Being a small hospitality and tourism (H&T) company, Joseph established his business in Hong Kong few years ago. The nature of Joseph's business is to act as an intermediary to customize package for the client who wants to visit Hong Kong for various purposes including convention and exhibition, excursion and tour package, sports event, accommodation arrangement and air ticket booking, to name but a few. Joseph recognizes that the competition is rather strong because there are many similar kinds of small and large providers in the market. It is rather difficult for Joseph's company to pursue aggressive strategy to complete with the major competitors owing to the limited capacity and economies of technology. However, the number of H&T companies with similar size like Joseph's company is very numerous so that the current market situation reaches the status of competitive parity. In order for Joseph's H&T company to outperform rivals, it is crucially important for Joseph to foray into aggressive competition by virtue of discerning his own company's core competence in its initial phase.

Through these years of operation, Joseph has built up a very extensive connections with a wide spectrum of external stakeholders including local and overseas business market, e.g. financial institutions, travel agencies, hotels, MICE venue providers, sports associations, restaurants, and airlines, etc. Joseph perceives these interorganizational relationships are the valuable intangible resources of the company from which competitive advantage could be developed to become the competitive advantage of the company in differentiating from other competitors of the same kind.

It is the first time for Joseph to seriously probe into the possibility of utilizing company's interorganizational relationship as a competitive strategy. Joseph is racking his brains in devising a plausible strategy for addressing this issue.

Question

Based on the way how Joseph develops his own company's competitive advantage through interorganizational relationship:

(i) What organizational structure will you suggest Joseph to adopt?

(ii) Explain the reasons for the organizational structure suggested by you in (i).

(iii) By referring to the organizational structure recommended by you in (i), identify and elaborate the challenges confronted by Joseph.