Cooperation in Clusters: A Study Case in the Furniture Industry in Colombia

Cooperation is increasingly been used in the industrial sector because of its benefits. This have motivated companies to establish alliances and agreements with others in order to reduce cost or access new markets, for example. In the literature, we could find many works aimed at cooperation in supply chains. A smaller amount was focused at cluster cooperation and few of them propose methodologies or models to facilitate the development and implementation of cooperation in industrial clusters. This paper provides a methodology for cooperation in clusters, which was applied to the furniture industry of Atlantico region in Colombia. Shapley value was used in order to evaluate the different coalitions and to split the benefits obtained with these coalitions. The methodology is useful for cluster members in order to encourage the formation of alliances within the cluster in order to overcome the prevailing mistrust, strengthening the cluster and gaining competitiveness.