With the division of labour, a specialised economic system has developed in which hardly any people are economically self-reliant in the sense that they produce all the goods and services they wish to consume. As a consequence, within today’s specialised economic system innumerable purchasing transactions have to occur. Since, on the one hand, we are all specialised and, on the other hand, we need the specialised goods and services of others, a vast network of exchange is necessary to allocate the available goods and services. In this context, companies are continuously focusing on their core capabilities, which inseparably asks for new forms of co-operation beyond the boundaries of an organisation: cooperative interorganisational relations. Since the mid-eighties we can also observe a rapidly growing body of literature on interorganisational co-operation.