Attitude of Companies: Network Collaboration vs. Competition

In the actual knowledge-base economy, new key driven factors for businesses have appeared - innovation, know-how and customer orientation. These factors are important for all industries and generate new forms of cooperation networks, focused on competitiveness increase. The main objective of this research was to create a condensed profile of the companies interested in joining a network and sharing good practices on innovation. We started our paper with an analysis on the benefits of clusters and networks for companies. In order to identify particularities of the SMEs involved in network activities, we focused on a case study on a life sciences network from Cluj-Napoca. We pointed out their characteristics such as: stage of development, level of cooperation with other firms, their interest in developing cooperation, especially for enhance international markets, their expectations and benefits from this type of cooperation and their attitudes regarding sharing information and best practices on innovations. Firms are increasingly focused on available key competencies and try to implement new knowledge generated by other actors in their industry. A tendency of specialization of the companies in certain activities and a high potential of vertical integration application within a network or industrial cluster are more and more visible. The conclusions focus on the reinforcement of the idea that in order to obtain knowledge, know-how firms increasingly rely on collaboration relationships within the network, which currently represents the most important channel for experience transmission and exchange. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).