Mobilizing minnows : small firms striving for global leadership

As small films have limited resources, they cannot out-muscle larger competitors, so they have to do something different - be innovative and leverage know-how and collaborate with others to increase the scale and scope of what they can offer to be globally competitive. This paper describes an iniatative by some Australian firms to collaborate on a large scale to improve their global competitiveness and market access over a two year period. Many of the firms regarded each other as competitors, and the participating SME's varied in size and capability. This resulted in a hub and spoke kind of configuration being the most common form of organization, with the hub firms cooperating with each other in some way. The participating firms have been able to access markets new to them, provided they are globally competitive, using a business model that links exploring opportunities via a "breeding environment" with exploiting opportunities via a form of "virtual enterprise".