Industrial markets are frequently characterized by an oligopolistic market structure. As a result, suppliers may become highly selective with respect to decisions that involve collaborating with certain customers. Buying firms must therefore be more attractive than their rivals to obtain...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of regional‐sectoral agglomerations – clusters – for the strategic management of firms. Concentration of firms along a single value chain is a common phenomenon in modern economies, but has seldom been reflected in the...

Purpose – This paper analyses firms, which survived in a collapsed regional cluster. The target is to analyze whether the principles for enduring success identified researching success factors of very old firms also apply in such an environment. Design/methodology/approach – The authors...

Purpose – Research results concerning the cost‐saving potential of international sourcing have been ambiguous and the topic has been covered in isolation without accounting for influences of alternative cost‐saving approaches. This paper aims to analyze the expected financial impact of...

Purpose This paper examines the competition between buying firms for the supplier’s competitive resources. The purpose of this paper is to examine how indirect capabilities – the ability to access external resources – can help in obtaining preferential resource allocation from suppliers....

Purpose – This paper aims to understand the factors that influence a supplier’s choice to treat selected customers more preferentially than others. Suppliers often lack the resources to treat all their customers equally, instead having to make choices to treat some customers as preferred....