Authors: Antonella La Rocca; Ivan Snehota
There is a considerable body of research showing that established businesses can in various ways benefit from mobilizing supplier resources. Prior studies have shown that management efforts on the part of the buying firm can influence suppliers’ commitment of resources to a customer. From a supplier perspective, this can be viewed as an issue of customer attractiveness. A customer is attractive if the supplier has a positive expectation of the relationship with this customer. The main focus of the extant research on mobilizing supplier resources and customer attractiveness has been established with on-going businesses. Less is known on how new business ventures can benefit from mobilizing supplier resources. Mobilizing supplier resources is conditional on suppliers finding the new venture attractive enough to motivate allocation of resources. The aim of our paper is to explore the issue of supplier resource mobilization taking a relational perspective to examine the scope for mobilizing supplier resources in the specific contexts of new ventures. Our findings suggest that in new ventures, supplier resources tend to be mobilized to achieve development and structuring effects rather than for cost-efficiencies. The elements of attractiveness of new ventures for established suppliers are significantly different from those of customer attractiveness for established businesses. In particular, that elements of attractiveness of the new venture for suppliers are partly access to important resources and social compatibility, but also the prominence of development effects as interacting with the new venture can be a driver of innovation for the supplier businesses.
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