Escuela Superior de Gestión Comercial y Marketing, ESIC
Abstract
Organisations are finding it more difficult to keep abreast with the pace of change. The continuous rise of
business opportunities and the increase in global competition demands a capability to acquire, assimilate,
transform and apply external critical knowledge to renew and reconfigure existing capabilities and knowledge,
and to innovate. Developing this dynamic capability requires, in turn, new proactive knowledge management
tools, and new organisational forms. This chapter presents a framework in which virtual networks constitute
more flexible new organisational structures to absorb and create knowledge. It also describes how embeddedness
in such a network can affect most of the factors identified as antecedents of absorptive capacity. In addition, it
evidences the important role of the firm�s relational capabilities in taking advantage of the relevant business
information, knowledge, resources, technologies and capabilities circulating in the virtual networks