ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the development of collective competence within an inter-organizational group in terms of proximity. Researchers and practitioners are therefore interested in means that might help inter-organizational groups to generate successful collective actions. Inter-organizational relations are reliant on the ability of their different members to pool their competences; the major challenge is to develop a collective competence despite differences. The collective of festivals was created in 2005 and is now an association grouping together 27 festivals in the region of Brittany, all committed to sustainable development. The chapter focuses on the five proximities operationalized by R. Boschma: geographical proximity, institutional proximity, organized proximity, cognitive proximity, and social proximity. At the beginning, cognitive and social proximities facilitated the enterprise. We noticed that later it was the collective as an entity that favored social proximity: The collective encourages the associations and favors the connection between them in order to collaborate.
