Value co-creation and entrepreneurial challenges in business networks: What factors impact upon the performance of firms in networks?

This study is aimed at deepening the relationship between networking and firms’ performance, seeking to understand if and to what extent networks’ specific features play a role in the value co-creation process and can affect the performance of firms. By combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies this study focuses its attention on the ‘business network contract’, a tool recently introduced into Italian law to improve firms’ competitiveness and attitudes towards innovation. Our findings contribute to the existing literature by complementing the network–firm performance models already analysed by the literature and by focusing the analysis, for the first time, on a tool that within the Italian context is growing in relevance—the business network contract tool.