SME NETWORKS PROFITABILITY EVALUATION: A SURVEY

Several papers and books can be found in the literature on “cooperation”, “co-ordination”, and “collaboration” concepts in the industrial area. However, to the authors’ experience deriving from the involvement in an EU-funded project on collaborative demand and supply networks, each research line seems to push its own vision which counters others. For an SME manager, however, it would be useful to provide a structural and integrated model in order to evaluate the potentiality of forming a new network or the inclusion of his/her SME in an existing network. This paper proposes a survey of the existing methods and models of SME networks, that forms the basis for their profitability evaluation. The survey analyzes the different approaches proposed in the literature through a common model of an SME network in terms of both a functional and a structural representation. A small number of network types are subsequently identified. Managers/owners of SMEs can use this classification to analyze if it is convenient to participate in a network or not. This decision depends on a comparison of the main SME features and the network structure.