Impact of Changing Facets of Inter-firm Interactions on Manufacturing Excellence: A Social Network Perspective of Indian Automotive Industry.

The inherent complexity of the innovation process puts interaction among firms and their specificities concerning the patterns of interaction at the center-stage. Hence, an uncovering of the interactive pattern among firms in the industry may reveal many hidden patterns, viz., the existing dependence and dominance structure of firms and the evolving dynamical changes based their on. Guided by these, this paper studies the vertical relational structure of automotive and auto component firms in Indian automotive supply chain where a clear ‘unequal balance of power’ is observed. We find that the industry network shows some prominent scale-free structural properties and complex dynamical behaviour. While analyzing further the Indian automotive industry’s possible evolutionary features we draw innovation and sustainability characteristics of this network, its inclination towards vulnerability and other policy implications.