Networks in the fashion business: From a production and distribution organizational form to a successful innovation driven brand strategy

Networks in the fashion business: From a production and distribution organizational form to a successful innovation driven brand strategy. Nowadays, to generate new value and innovate, especially in the fashion business, firms have to develop new approaches. Collaborations between brands in the last decades is becoming a reliable source of innovation allover the firm, generating relevant competitive advantages. Collaboration strategies, defined also as the creation of a network between companies or other institutions, evolved during the recent years from an only productive and supply chain solution to an also concrete brand strategy, developed to improve consumers based objectives and totally reorganize firms structures. This paper starts analyzing the cultural and historical evolution of network organizational forms, and their development across the time and the space, from the first attempts to concrete successful cases of networked organizations. A deep review of the literature is pivotal to concretely understand why and how the use of this structure changed during the years, and evaluate the reasons of its arose and diffusion. The paper will try to understand the dynamics behind the development of a collaborative strategy in the most successful innovative companies, taking in consideration how the temporal and cultural context affect the implementation of collaborative networks. The following part focuses on the implication of a collaborative strategy in the fashion system, trying to understand with a brand managerial interpretation, the strategic network implementations of fashion brands and how those evolved through the time becoming pivotal aspects of their success. To concretely understand this cause-effect process that connects organizational strategic decisions with their effects on brand perception, the paper analyzes the adidas’ collaborative approach, called “Open Source”, part of the 2016-2020 business plan “how we create the new” and how collaborations are seen as a crucial aspect of the entire business strategy of one of the biggest fashion companies in the world.