Issues of participant absorptive capacity in establishing virtual enterprise operations

Abstract

The author is involved in a multi-year program to establish a number of large-scale SME collaboration projects. It was anticipated that some web-based tools used previously could be adapted, but limits in the participant firm capabilities and the emergence of a different business model led to a change in approach. In this paper an adaptation of the notion of absorptive capacity where both a firm's resource base and its knowledge base are considered is used as a framework to better understand participant requirements in building a web-based Virtual Enterprise support system.