Partnering strategies of innovative start-up firms: an interfirm knowledge network simulation study

摘要

Start-up firms play a significant role in economic development. For small and medium-sized start-up firms, normally they have their suppliers, customers, competitors and third-party partners in a local region. A major strategic decision of startup firms is how to select potential partners within the region. Many factors are involved in partnering strategies. In this paper, the authors regard the target region or industry as an inter-firm network, and examine the effect of different partnering strategies from the viewpoint of knowledge diffusion within the target network. A computational simulation based on the multi-agent method reveals that some strategies are more suitable for certain strategic purposes.