Designing a model for the creation of export consortia in the context of industrial clusters

Despite the considerable number of small and medium size enterprises, their impact on the economic area is not remarkable due to the existing limitations in the area of financial resource, human resource, market accessibility and market information. Since most of the active enterprises in industrial clusters are small and medium enterprises, and considering that the characteristics of the industrial cluster affect the function of active enterprises within the cluster and these features facilitate marketing and export activities, One of the most significant ways to overcome these limitations is to organizing and strengthening of the powers of the small firms through the establishment of network and common collaboration between enterprises in the export area as well as the design of a model for the establishment of export consortia. In this research, the goal is providing a model for the creation of export consortia in the context of industrial clusters, information resources from semi-structured interviews with cluster development agent, managers of industrial units that involved in industrial clusters and the study of institutional documents, were collected. It identifies the dimensions, components and features that influence the establishment of a successful export consortium according to the grounded theory by doing open, axial, and selective coding. In addition, 205 concepts were categorized in the form of a model into 26 sub-categories and 6 main categories including causal conditions, main phenomena, executive strategies, underlying factors, confounding factors and consequences. By receiving expert opinions on industrial clusters and export consortiums with a successful or unsuccessful experience through statistical analysis of the questionnaire and using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and through identifying the weight of each category and concept, their relative importance in the success of export consortia was discussed. The proposed model incorporates all the factors that contribute to the establishment of successful export consortia and can be used as a comprehensive model.