Lahore Woven Garments Consortium (LGC)

Abstract

In October 2005 Jawwad Chaudhry, Director Musterhaft and Chairman LGC, was reflecting upon the performance benefits and sustainability of the Lahore Garments Consortium (LGC) Guarantee Limited. LGC consisted on eight woven garment manufactures and exporters. The CEOs of Musterhaft and Cotton Web were two particularly active members of LGC. Members of the consortium benefitted from joint purchases, joint skill development and joint marketing. Variations in the size of the firms in terms of number of machines, employees, product quality and target markets were some of the factors influencing the ability to develop consensus and a shared vision among consortium members.

Proximity and its impact on the formation of product and process innovation networks among producer firms

“…In particular, the impact of cognitive proximity is quite high. A possible explanation for this stronger impact of cognitive proximity dimensions on process innovations network may be the fact that innovation in traditional clusters is prevalently incremental or process-related (Dooley et al, 2015), owing to which managers and entrepreneurs in traditional industries participate in joint actions with other proximate partners, who are either using the same machinery/technology and also working in the same textile value chain, predominantly to solve machinery and production related issues or either to increase their production capacities and technical upgrading of production processes (Ghani and Fayyaz, 2007). Other possible reason for this high impact of proximity on process innovations network is that cluster firms share same language, culture and values, which is more conducive for transferring tacit (process) knowledge (Gertler, 2003;Nilsson and Mattes, 2015;Laursen et al, 2016).…”

“…Second, a strong culture of cooperation and support exists among cluster firms in Pakistan's textile and clothing sector (Ghani and Fayyaz, 2007;Rehman, 2016) cooperation among these firms in the local cluster (Nilsson, 2019). This relational embeddedness also nourishes the organisational and cognitive proximity among firms owing to their association with a single parent company (family group).…”