Special Networks Enhancing Competitiveness Within The Hungarian Food Industry

Although food industry has been losing significance within the national industry for the last couple of years, it is still an important branch of the Hungarian economy. Owing to its role played in the domestic food supply, food export and food processing, furthermore because of the great demand for agricultural products, its strategic importance cannot be questioned. It is for years now that besides meeting EU requirements, the improvement of competitiveness is the factor that has been standing in the centre of the development process of Hungarian food industry. A gradually strengthening subject of research being done on corporate competitiveness is the investigation of effectiveness of corporate strategies. This research is based on those responses of certain successful companies, which they have given to the stimuli of their environment. The initiative or accommodating skills of the so called ‘innovative organizations’ are investigated as a global system of organizational changes through the following dimensions: • organizational structure • values of organization • processes within an organization • changes of organizational boundaries Networks and clusters appear when organizational boundaries change. Creating clusters is one of the answers given to global challenges. Nowadays, even the competition (which is really serious) takes place between corporate contractors much rather than between individual companies. The importance of creating clusters is a recognition of companies, that they can survive only by depending on their local business partners (as a local background to them), in a very strong global competition. There are two levels of those effects that clusters have on competing advantages. On the one hand they play an important role in improving and maintaining of corporate competing advantages, on the other hand they have a crucial function in preserving the economic competitiveness of a region. The overall aim of food industrial clusters is on the one hand to improve the competitiveness of the branch, on the other hand to make it responsive to international challenges. Within the Hungarian food industry certain organizations have appeared which can be competitive both on domestic and on foreign markets as well. A new view is being formed by those firms too which used to be only followers to the others. As for competition, there is a great diversity among the small-and medium scale enterprises, although it has nothing to do with the size of a company. Most of the entrepreneurs are not aware of the situation of their competitors. However, if organised into networks or clusters, they could improve not only their own competitiveness, but also that of the Hungarian food industry. Despite that our food industry is legging behind a bit because of factors like incorrect knowledge of market or unprofessional leaders, fortunately, there is a change on the way.