Análise da trajetória de uma rede de pequenas e médias empresas inserida no programa redes de cooperação do Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

The cooperation networks have been seeing as an important way to improve the competitiveness of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) in many countries around the world. This kind of inter-organizational arrangement can offer several kinds of assets to the enterprises that belong to this network. A way to better to understand this relationship is by analyzing its dynamic through time using a chain of main events that forms the network trajectory. Understanding in this way, how internal and external factors influence the network trajectory. For this purpose it was developed a case study with a descriptive-exploratory approach and a historic-longitudinal perspective, having as object the Ação Magistral network which gather compounding pharmacies located in many Brazilian states. As result, it was identified a way how the assets offered by have developed through years and how some events have impacted this assets. This study has searched for the relation with external and internal influence factors and its impact on the network results during the entire network trajectory. For example, it was perceived that governmental support had a strong impact on early stages of the studied network, mainly on its foundation and during other stages of the network it had minimal impact. Besides that, this study uses an actual approach on network studies used by many contemporaneous researchers on this area.