Title: Interfirm Alliances: A Collaborative Entrepreneurship Perspective
Abstract: IntroductionFor several years, competing meant reducing costs, as this concept was closely linked to scale economies, and the same strategies were systematically applied.The term of competitiveness was used to characterise firms' greater or lesser capacity to face the competition.Nowadays, the European Union forces firms to adopt stronger competitive positions, so as to respond to market changes, and to some extent, to be able to survive in their sphere of operation.The continuing need for improvement and constantly increased productivity is an important challenge faced by firms today.For this reason, it can be stated that firms have difficulty in competing individually supported exclusively by its own resources.In fact, at present, and even more so in the future, competitiveness appears in firms' relationships and networks.Therefore, to compete in a highly complex market, firms must establish cooperations as a business strategy to face difficulties that may emerge.In this context, entrepreneurship appears to be a suitable approach, as it aims at discovering, evaluating and exploiting new business opportunities (Kirzner, 1973;Shane & Venkataraman, 2000;Venkataraman, 1997).This includes activities such as scanning the external environment for new markets, unmet needs, existing problems in work processes and new product ideas (Sandberg, 1991;Sayles & Stewart, 1995).Entrepreneurship is a concept that began to be important at the end of the eighties (Miller & Friesen, 1983;Stevenson & Jarillo, 1990).Since then, a growing amount of literature has helped firms to understand the organisational process that facilitates business behaviour.However, despite all the efforts to study this behaviour and although the business context offers an excellent reference to carry out investigations, entrepreneurship still requires more study in order to establish its legitimacy and specific contribution.Examination of business initiative involves distinction between two types of research: one based on the function of the business-person and the other analysing the business behaviour of existing firms.Older studies focus on the first category, i.e., they focus on the characteristics and behaviour of business-people and analyse the creation of new organisations (e.g.Aldrich, 1990).This paper, however, will come under the second category, i.e., concentrating on business initiative at the corporative level (Stevenson & Jarillo, 1990).www.intechopen.