Developing and managing strategic partnership.

Abstract

This paper reports the empirical work carried out in the first stage of a three year Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded project. The first stage of the project: ''The Development of Partnership Strategies'' is the subject of this paper; it is concerned with testing, in an inter-firm context, a technique which has been validated in an intra-firm context. The technique is concerned with identifying the nature, strength, and sustainability of competitive advantage in terms of the features which customers value, the intangible resources which produce these features and the development scenarios for each key intangible resource. The companies collaborating in the research include: Flymo Ltd. (Electrolux) and Cellnet plc (British Telecom.).