Competitive networking for SMEs in Italy. How Small and Medium Italian Enterprises can face Global Competition by Aggregating.

This paper intends to give evidence to an empirical case of excellence, which is emerging as a prototype in the agri-food industry since its establishment: the Agribusiness Cluster Brixia (hereafter, ACB). A well-defined group of companies highly specialized in technology; the Cluster shares and integrates skills at every stage of the supply chain, from farm production to food distribution, from storing to processing As ACB has been built in order to face hyper competition in a crisis market, the aim of this paper is to verify if it has really achieved advantages for the partners, by reducing some competitive costs for the partners involved entering new markets, and by developing new, cooperative solutions to the customers needs.