How can Italian Enterprises face Global Competition and Financial Crisis by Aggregating. The case of Agribusiness Cluster Brixia

Global companies face the challenges of global markets by engaging in strategic alliances and adopting flexible management solutions, in order to give the customers the most suitable solutions to their needs. The pool of strategic alliances into which a company enters with different partners can lead to the creation of different competitive aggregations (such as networks, clusters, districts), defined as collection of businesses with similar and complementary needs and compatible information systems, but with different aims and cultural values – so that they can collaborate without merging. Those businesses are linked each other by dynamic cooperative relations, affecting the network organisation and structure. Product differentiation is certainly a key concept for competitive businesses and networks, usually becoming the core of the alliances’ system; thus, it involves specific costs, that are necessary to validate the physical product, and the intangible features (brand, colour, design and so on) and that can be reduced by acting in cooperation with other partner’ companies. International literature usually refers the high recourse to cooperative aggregations, is usually referred to understand the competitive attitude of global companies, but there is a lack of evidence on small and medium enterprises (hereafter, SME). Yet, we think that empirical evidence shows cases in which a similar approach is successfully adopted by small enterprises, finding this as a way of reducing competitive costs – rising from hypercompetitive markets features. Aim of the paper Starting from those considerations, this paper intends to give evidence to an empirical case of excellence, which is emerging as a prototype in the agrifood 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 hypercompetition 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.