The strategic orientation of the managerial ties for new product development

Abstract

The creation of partnerships with external actors is a key success factor for the Extended Enterprise (EE) and in order to manage the knowledge grasped from these partners, it is necessary to structure them into networks and communities of practice. In this paper, we show that strategic communities can emerge from networks of partners. In fact, in the case study, a firm gathers its external partners in a network for the managerial collaboration and assembles the ones that are more strategic for the knowledge creation and sharing in a community. The context of the research is the automotive industry and the partners of the large manufacturing firm provides the after-sales services for the automotive products. Managerial collaboration contributes to the identification of the most strategic partners, thus, the emergence of strategic ties. We identify, through various data collection methods, the mechanisms and dynamics of managerial and strategic ties. The first are known interdependencies, integrated Information Technology (IT) tools, trust and collaborative leadership and the second are specific IT tools to insert technical new knowledge, strategic gatekeepers to filter knowledge and a nonfinancial reward system to enhance knowledge sharing.