My path through university and career has brought me to the development of information systems and related organizational aspects, the development of business support services at national or governmental, European and international level, international and business support network’s management, all the way to the consulting services in my own company where I am interconnecting all the skills and knowledge I have received so far. I soon, realised that the networking/partnering/clustering approach is of extreme importance for competitiveness, however only with a duly selected form or type of networking/partnering/clustering in relation to a specific problem or vision of a company, and at the same time with the right management which considers both the different aspects of networking/partnering/clustering as well as the trends in the environment, and together with this also introduces suitable methods and tools used among individuals in a selected connection. In practice, numerous combinations are of course established, and the influence alone of these combinations on management or even development of suitable tools has not yet been systematically researched. My experience as well as the interim results of research work, shows that different combinations of the elements evident in the graph presented below (Figure 1) substantially affect the selection of suitable management, and all together affect the final success of any networking/partnering/clustering forms.
These and other questions are hiding in the research model you can see in Figure 1, where I am trying to systematically deal with the topic of networking/partnering/clustering management, and most of all confirm or negate some basic hypotheses, among others:
- every problem in a company can be solved with a suitable model of networking/partnering/clustering and corresponding management approach;
- governmental initiatives do not meet the trends;
- an exchange of experience, knowledge, tools, good practices, training programmes among individual different types of networking/partnering/clustering is necessary to better understand the advantages and weaknesses of individual types, and to improve the existent tools, training programmes and management approaches.
I will use the following graph (Figure 1) as the basis: