Governing Supplier Parks Mari Sako Governing Supplier Parks: Implications for Firm Boundaries and Clusters Mari Sako Professor of Management Studies Said Business School University of Oxford
[email protected] Comments welcome. July 2003 Version The aim of this paper is to analyze the causes and consequences of the emergence of supplier parks in the global automobile industry. They represent, for some, new experiments in production and logistics management; for others, they are a reversion back to the Rouge model of a highly vertically integrated factory, except that ownership is fragmented. Thinking more broadly about international trade and the political economy of regional development, supplier parks are subjected again to different interpretations. At one extreme, they may be regarded as clusters with all the goodness of a locally embedded production system, but at the other extreme they constitute an ultimate tool by multinational corporations to de-territorialize and control the ‘global commodity chain’. How can we relate these different views with each other? Starting with greenfield sites in emerging markets, especially Brazil, supplier parks have been spreading rapidly in Europe and North America in the recent past. This makes it particularly timely to examine the key drivers for creating supplier parks and the main challenges in the successful execution of supplier parks. A supplier park may be defined as a cluster of suppliers located adjacent to, or close to, a final assembly plant. It is used as a generic term to refer to the phenomena variously termed industrial parks, supplier campuses, modular consortia and condominiums. The paper develops a typology of supplier parks by identifying key attributes of their governance within the supplier park and its link to the region and beyond.