INTRODUCTION

Two small Italian steelwork companies, Cimolai and CMF, in association with other large size companies, have won several tenders for the construction of important European public works such as the East Bridge of the Storebælt crossing and the Grand Canal Maritime bridge. The interesting point is that the two companies did not play a second line role, but submitted their own bid as independent partners within the winning consortia. The problem is then to understand how two small firms can compete - and win - in the construction market not just working traditionally as specialised subcontractors, but as front line leaders. This issue seems to be crucial if we consider that the competition in this industry is ‘a matter of size’ and that the market, at least in the European context, is increasingly assuming the form of the oligopoly, where only very few economic agents are allowed to act. Things, perhaps, are more complex. Considering a strategy that, under certain conditions and in certain contexts, allows small firms to compete with market leaders could represent a way to get to a more precise representation of the market trends. In particular, it is possible to identify strategies based upon the combination of specific technical skills - related to well defined aspects of the construction process - and the ability to integrate these specific skills into the global process of the realisation of the project. That is to say, the competitive advantage is based not only on the capacity of the firm to produce with lower costs and/or with better quality but also on its ability to redefine the client’s needs exploiting its own technical skills. In this case, the size of the firm is not any more a crucial matter; instead the management of information to create new value becomes the critical point. In the first part of the paper, we focus on the two case studies: the tender won by CMF in Denmark for the construction of the approach viaducts of the East Bridge of the Storebælt crossing and Cimolai's winning bid for the Grand Canal Maritime bridge in Le Havre. In the second, we consider the limits of a traditional approach to the analysis of the competitive advantage in relationship to the two case studies. The elements for a more accurate general framework are discussed in the third section. The relationship between the nature of the domestic market and the strategy of the firm is taken into account in the fourth section. The last section analyses the features of the procurement policy that must be present to implement the identified strategy.