Strategic and Managerial Ties for the New Product Development

The extended enterprise continuously creates partnerships with external partners for innovation. The structuring of these partners into networks and communities of practice is an efficient manner to manage their knowledge. In this paper, we show that strategic communities can emerge from managerial networks through a case study about a large manufacturing company, in the automotive industry, gathering its after sales services partners in a network, for the managerial collaboration, and the most strategic ones in a community. We use various data collection methods: interviews with the managers of the network and the strategic community, a survey dedicated to a sample from the network population, and a questionnaire to the strategic partners. We provide the mechanisms and dynamics of the managerial and strategic ties. The firsts are known-interdependencies, integrated IT-tools, trust and collaborative leadership. The successful collaboration contributes to the identification of the most strategic partners, thus the emergence of strategic ties. The strategic community uses a specific IT-tool to insert technical new knowledge that is filtered by strategic gatekeepers and benefits from a non-financial reward system to enhance knowledge sharing.