The role of technological know‐how in c‐commerce success

Collaborative commerce (c‐commerce), involving the use of technology to enable and facilitate inter‐organizational processes, is an increasingly important area for technology innovation and investment, and has become a backbone of modern business activity. A vital basis for enhancing the likelihood of c‐commerce success is an understanding of the factors that contribute to that success. This research studies one set of such factors: the facets of an organization's technological know‐how for performing inter‐firm collaboration. It builds on prior research that finds a link between organizational know‐how and successful inter‐firm collaboration to develop hypotheses about the relationship between an organization's technological know‐how for performing inter‐organizational collaboration and the success of such collaboration. These hypotheses are tested using data collected from survey respondents who have led c‐commerce initiatives. We find support for the proposition that there are aspects of an organization's technological‐collaborative know‐how that have a significant positive relationship with the firm's c‐commerce success.