Network Structure Analysis for Multicultural Industrial CNO

Emerging countries like China offer low wages, large production capacities and a huge potential market. Large Western companies already took advantage of these opportunities by opening their own factories in China to build up local supply chains and address this new market, but this solution is not adapted to SME having very limited human and financial resources. Therefore new business models must be developed for them. This paper presents a multicultural collaborative network of industrial SME including Swiss and Chinese partners. We will first describe the collaboration goals and context, identify the cultural differences affecting the choice of the Chinese network type, analyse the strengths and weaknesses of possible solutions and finally present the realized one.