Collaborative Networks Between Corporate Universities, Customers, and SMEs: Integrating Strategy Towards Value Creation

Corporate universities have become a new paradigm in the fields of education and business, but its applicability may be limited to large corporations and multinationals, due to the need for resources and infrastructure that their operation requires. However, networking, agreements, partnerships, and cooperation initiatives between corporate universities of these large corporations and small businesses, suppliers, and other actors are welcome as a way to generate common and integrating strategies across their value chains. In many cases and in certain sectors, companies have already reached levels of maximum efficiency in their value chains, identifying this concept as the set of internal processes that are adding value to the company’s products or services. That is the reason why it is necessary to extend this concept to the so-called value network, describing this concept as all internal and external processes that add value to the company’s products or services and where appear external partners outside the company, such as SMEs, suppliers, funding entities, organizations, and government institutions, among other actors. In this document the possibility of establishing collaborative networks between corporate universities of large companies and their SME partners is analyzed as a way to establish and empower a common and integrated strategy to improve the processes of these small business partners and redirect them towards meeting the objectives of the large corporation and upgrading the efficiency in the value network.