Collaborative innovation within clusters is first to create new opportunities and generate innovations ready to be released on the market. However, if innovation networks have been widely studied by monitoring tools, governance and coordination, with finance, intellectual property or HR practices, staff training, trust between partners, externalities or by dynamism of SMEs, a deficiency persists in current research about the strategic orientation of the composite innovation networks, in particular customer or market orientation in the dynamics of projects / actors. While we are in the current research that highlight the specificities of the French competitiveness clusters composed of complementary players (Research, Academic and Enterprise), we intend to focus on the fact that collaborative innovation is tensioned by differentiated strategic intentions and profiles specifically related to heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, partners driven by a common project. By an empirical analysis on the SCS French cluster, we try to understand how the customer orientation fits in the clusters, and the role that marketing plays in dynamic collaborative innovation within competitiveness clusters.
