Collective Entrepreneurship in the Contemporary European Services Industries: A Long Term Approach

After the end of World War II, Switzerland became a key hub for international commodity traders, even though most of the commodities they were dealing in were sourced from outside of Switzerland and were not meant for Swiss producers, refiners or consumers. The main aim of this chapter is to analyze why Switzerland became the centre for international commodity trading in the Western world. The chapter will especially focus on the period from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s. Given that commodity trading companies throughout history have been notoriously closed to external scrutiny, the chapter by need is mainly based on publicly available material. The chapter utilizes the concept of collective entrepreneurship as an analytical framework to situate the development.

This chapter studies the tourism cluster of Majorca and its connection with collective entrepreneurship. To this end, the authors review the history of four world leading Spanish hotel companies, from their beginnings, in Majorca, in the 1950s, to their internationalization, in the 1980s and 1990s: Barceló, Meliá, Riu, and Iberostar. This allows us to identify common patterns of behaviour among them over time, which in turn illustrate the dynamics of the tourism cluster and the role played by its context. This qualitative and historical research allows us to make the following contributions: first, in line with other studies in the economic history of Spanish tourism, the four cases support the identification of Majorca as a tourism cluster. Second, the authors highlight several important characteristics of the island which reinforced and strengthened the cluster and boosted collective entrepreneurship, through an intense flow of information between the companies. Third, the authors illustrate coopetition as the key nature of the relationship between the clustered companies in a simultaneous process of competition and cooperation. Finally, the authors show how the strength of the tourism cluster, in Majorca, drove the companies to replicate the same dynamics and structures abroad.

The growth of the healthcare industry since the middle of the nineteenth century has offered medical doctors a broad range of opportunities to develop their private practice. However, a major challenge was accessing the new medical technology at the core of this growth, as operation rooms, X-ray machines, laboratories and sterilization equipment were mostly centred in hospitals. Based on the case of Geneva, Switzerland, this chapter discusses the various strategies adopted by medical doctors to benefit from hospital infrastructure for their work. It demonstrates that collective entrepreneurship emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, when groups of doctors started to open collective clinics in response to the impossibility of using the infrastructure of the local public hospital linked to the University of Geneva. This heyday of collective private clinics lasted until the 1990s when listed companies and private investors took over and reorganized these private healthcare organizations.

This chapter contributes to a better knowledge of the role played by the collective entrepreneurship of networks of scientists and doctors in the transfer and adaptation of ideas on hospital organization and management for modern hospitals with new technology, from Western Europe and above all the United States. Literature about new medical technology has demonstrated how medical innovations required changes in human capital and organization in hospitals, to benefit patients in the private and the public hospitals after World War II. The chapter provides an analysis about the origins of the modern North American ideas about professionalization and hospital accreditation, in the consolidation of a modern hospital management and organization. In particular, the focus is in demonstrating how networks of scientists’ entrepreneurs were fundamental drivers in the process of knowledge transfer and the dissemination of these ideas to the large Western European hospitals. More specifically, the chapter studies the diffusion of the new ideas about the large hospital organization and management from the United States to the Western Europe, applied to the Spanish context. Informal networks of doctors applied new ideas developed in the United States to new clinics and hospitals in Spain. Some of them occupied official positions in the key public health administrations and were crucial to introducing the hospital accreditation systems and the US ideas in Spain.

This chapter focusses on entrepreneurship and policies of public services in England, specifically leisure centre provision in the UK during the late twentieth century. The central role played by local authorities in sport provision was complimented by an increasing cadre of leisure sector professionals and with increasing architectural interest in the provision of leisure. The institutional context was framed by the Sports Development Council (SDC) after 1965 together with the broader action of local authorities who aimed to provide their ratepayers with access to improved sport and leisure services. The resulting leisure centres were perhaps a way to signal the prestige of local authorities but were expensive investments. The capability of local authorities was boosted by the local government reforms of the 1970s, which merged districts, pooling their resources. The possibility of support from private capital and after 1973 from the European Economic Community (EEC) also provided new opportunities for the organizational form. Eventually, there was a shift in emphasis from the provision of organized sport to that of more individualized and commercialized “leisure” as a product. Whether or not this achieved the long-term aims of central government, to improve access to sport and to tackle urban challenges, remains questionable. However, the story of leisure provision in the UK remains one of remarkable public sector entrepreneurship within an institutional context.

Alliances between companies are an example of a collaborative strategy adopted in anticipation of highly uncertain markets. Since 1980, the commercial airline industry has been affected by a progressive liberalization worldwide. In this historical context, most airlines reacted with defensive movements in the face of high competition. In the case of airlines in the Spanish market, one of the largest in the world due to the weight of the tourism sector in its economy, airlines responded in various ways to the intensification of competition. Iberia, the main Spanish airline, established different defensive alliance policies. In the 1980s, alliances were mainly collaborative. Since 1998, airline alliances have become coopetitive in nature, as was the case with the creation of One World group (American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Qantas and Iberia). The partners began to interact in a more horizontal way, maintaining various agreements (code-sharing, handling, schedule coordination, shared sales, fleet maintenance) without renouncing their independence in the face of global competition. Iberia has subsequently modified the composition of its portfolio to move towards a more vertical collaboration with the integration into the IAG Group (Iberia, British Airways, Air Lingus and Vueling). This second phase is a quest to increase market power with deep changes in the nature of its alliances while maintaining coopetitive alliances.

This chapter explores how network bricolage, as a form of collective entrepreneurship, develops over time and influences the shape and form of an organization. Using a historical organization study of SEUR, a Spanish courier company founded in 1942, the authors show how network bricolage is implemented as a dynamic process of collaborative efforts between bricoleurs who draw on their historical experience to build and develop an organization. Our study offers two main contributions. In combining network bricolage with ideas of collective entrepreneurship, the authors first extend knowledge about the practice of bricolage and the role of the bricoleur in the entrepreneurial context beyond start-up. Second, the authors show that, while entrepreneurs’ decisions are historically contingent, it is how entrepreneurs wed past experience with current context which informs their actions in the present, shaping the enterprise for the future.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between biotechnology start-ups and larger pharmaceutical corporations when they work as partners in innovation strategic alliances. For three decades, these companies have become major players in innovation in the health sector. This means that the development of many products is a result of the cooperation they carry out. However, due to the great differences between these companies, certain problems can often arise. More specifically, our analysis explores the perceptions of the achievement expected by each partner. This is an important aspect to determine the satisfaction of these firms among strategic alliance. The authors follow qualitative methods to address the topic, conducting personal interviews with managers of these companies. Our findings reveal the concrete facts that can prevent reaching the proposed goals of these partners as well as stress the crucial importance of the human aspect to mitigate potential problems.

This research explores how subsidiary embeddedness in different networks, both internal and external to the firm, contributes to the innovation of the service multinational corporation (MNC). Specifically, the authors analyze the different effects of networks on MNC’s subsidiaries performing competence-creating or competence-exploiting innovation activities, in the context of the service industry. The present study analyzes the data of 178 foreign-owned subsidiaries in the service sector performing innovation in Spain. The results of data analysis at two points in time show that external and internal embeddedness have a positive impact on the subsidiary innovation. Moreover, external embeddedness has a major positive influence on the competence-creating rather than on the competence-exploiting activities, while the internal embeddedness is equally important for both types of innovation. Therefore, this study contributes to further our understanding of how subsidiaries’ linkages affect innovation of the service MNC.

In this chapter, the authors explore collective entrepreneurship through the lens of how public entrepreneurship boosts collective action towards a common good. The role of public entrepreneurs and the collaborative nature of innovation community members evidence a collective action that pursues a socio-political change. Through a case study contextualized during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in Spain, the authors explore how a public entrepreneur triggered a collective action that led to the creation of the innovation community: The Coronavirus makers. This collaborative network groups more than 20,000 researchers, developers, and engineers. They altruistically put their knowledge and resources at the service of the community to provide solutions for one of the healthcare system’s main problems at that time – the shortage of medical supplies to cope with the increasing number of COVID-19 cases. The collective action of the Coronavirus makers has impacted the health and wellbeing fields, the community and the values that should define social change and allow the construction of a more open, equitable and sustainable society. Potentially, our findings confirm that collective entrepreneurship derives from a function of collective action.