ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at strategic partnerships and the way in which they restructure industries, redefining boundaries and creating new barriers to entry. The analysis proceeds in three steps. We briefly discuss the emergence of a knowledge based mode of competition and its globalization. We emphasize the way in which these changes have eroded the basis for the formation of traditional oligopolies. Then mapping the growth of inter-firm collaboration and its relationship to decentralization within the firm, we examine one of the most interesting and potentially most important of the changes in longer-term firm strategy-the emergence of new forms of global competition based on networked, knowledge-based oligopolies,1 and illustrate this with examples from electronics and biotechnology.
