A Study on Methodologies to Develop an e-Industrial Cluster Hub System using Social Networks

This study analyzed the structure of cooperation and competition among firms in various relationships of interest that participated in the establishment of an e-industrial cluster system using social networks and reflected the resulting implications in building an e-industry cluster hub system. Participating firms employed a variety of business models and highly complicated networks and their networks of cooperation and competition were quite inefficient and self-centric, thus failing to evolve a competitive structure from competitive pricing to competitive added value, through sharing of information, functions and processes using inter-firm networks. As such, this study attempted to apply information, functions and processes designed to improve upon various problems discovered from an analysis of social networks to the analysis and design of an e-industrial cluster system to accelerate the industries’ evolution and to enhance national competitiveness. Examples of such application are also provided.