Crecimiento de empresas emprendedoras de base profesional: análisis de un caso de cooperación

Abstract

This paper reviews the experience of a cooperative network of professional and technology-based entrepreneurial firms. The study starts from the problems that each company and the network had to face during its setting up and follows their life cycle up to the recent past. The case shows the advantages and disadvantages of the hybrid solution between organic and external growth, focusing on the necessary resources at each stage of the life cycle. The analysis has been structured under a model that explains the decision to initiate cooperation - and, where appropriate, to keep it- with ten factors grouped into three categories: motivational variables (optimizing resources; grow without losing the essence), necessary variables (agreement on the vision and objectives; agreement on the governance of the network), and facilitating variables (common characteristics; trust; previous experience; complementary resources; internal leadership; external promotion). A qualitative methodology has been chosen because of several reasons: the proposed objectives have to be addressed through direct observation and the accumulation of cases to the general knowledge; there are many non-quantifiable aspects of the object of study; and the number of participants is limited. The conclusions of this paper show that the potentials and needs of cooperation among technology-based firms have a natural life cycle, similar to that of cooperation among people within each of those companies, whose pattern must be observed to increase the chances of success. In the initial phase, nascent technology entrepreneurs tend to support each other to fill their gaps and this support is facilitated by trust -a resource generated by affinity and physical proximity; these entrepreneurs often have insufficient knowledge of management -therefore, meeting together in informal clubs where they exchange information is very useful; the governance of these clubs should be essentially informal and dynamic; at this stage, external promotion that replaces the original internal leadership -when it is poorly defined- becomes a key factor. At a later stage, each micro-firm and its professionals will be well established in the market, and there appears the need of growing without losing the essence; the way to overcome the shortage of the required resources for that new goal is cooperation by means of a consortium or network; now, informal personal networks should be replaced by a more professionalized and formal systems with well-defined internal governance; external promotion may continue to be needed, but its role should be reduced to the role of arbiter in the process of reaching consensuses, always avoiding replacing the internal leadership.