Identifying and exploiting the collaboration factors inside SMEs networks

Present research introduces a procedure for the analysis of the collaborative behaviour inside industry networks. Collaboration is seen as a collection of factors, each of them boosting competitive advantages to industry networks of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The distinctiveness of the research is that there is not a preliminary choice of the technical and organising factors that contribute to establish any forms of collaboration among the SMEs. As there is a large number of typologies among the industry networks, it has been necessary to highlight the common features and the main interactions with the inside and the outside of the network by building a meta-model of the network organisation. Collaboration factors were extracted applying the non-linear principal components analysis to a large set of data collected by the EU project CODESNET. The extracted collaboration factors become the entries of a modified SWOT analysis. The result of the process is the evaluation of the potential directions of collaboration independent from the specific network type.