The Role of Leadership in Complex Strategic Networks: Enabling Effect Versus Emergence

In today's knowledge-based economy, the sources of competitive advantage lie more and more in webs of interactions among a variety of actors (such as firms, universities, research organizations, government institutions and so on), that over time originate the emergence of strategic networks. The paper aims to shed light on the determinants of network interaction and the ensuing processes of knowledge and resource transfer and circulation, on which the networkbased sources of competitive advantage are rooted. Accordingly, by means of the adoption of the complexity system perspective, on the one hand, we underscore the emergent nature of network interactions stemming from the self-organizing …