Paper info

Measuring Network Competence: some international evidence

Ian Wilkinson , Thomas Ritter and Wesley Johnston

This paper was published in Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, volume 17 (2/3), pages 119-138, in 2002.

We argue that the ability of a firm to develop and manage relations with key suppliers, customers and other organisations and to deal effectively with the interactions among these relations is a core competence of a firm - one that has a direct bearing on a firm's competitive strength and performance. We refer to this as a firm's network competence. In the first part of the paper we describe work in Germany that has led to the development and calibration of a scale to measure a firms network competence. In the second part we report the results of preliminary studies designed to develop and test the validity of the scale in an English speaking context. The results show that the measurement of network competence is valid and that the same relations between network competence and performance measures found in the German research hold. We further show that the measure of network competence is empirically and conceptually distinct to that of the market orientation scale.