This paper is an attempt to demonstrate that firm networks is the typical institutional arrangement of Complex Production Systems, marked by a strong specialization of participating agents and an intense complementarity among them. In this type of arrangement, the firm in charge of network governance needs to stimulate the search for collective efficiency. This search, in turn, given the frequent heterogeneity among agents, ends up inducing the formation of a learning network. In spite of the fact that the accumulated knowledge on learning networks is precarious, it is possible to recommend, based on a literature review and the example of a learning network being implemented in Brazil, the following points: the network needs a clear purpose translatable in a target to be met by a learning process; it is necessary to create a structure, which can be virtual, and define resources and mechanisms to be used in the implementation and support of the network; it should be tried to forecast, departing from other experiences, the inevitable difficulties that would come up in the design and implementation of such networks.
Complex Production Systems; firms networks; learning network; supply chain