Business ecosystem embeddedness to enhance supply chain competence: the key role of external knowledge capacities Riquelme Medina, Marta Stevenson, Mark Barrales Molina, Vanesa Llorens Montes, Francisco J. Supply chain competence Business ecosystem embeddedness Absorptive capacity Desorptive capacity Connective capacity This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Business under Grant ECO2017-84138-P; FEDER/Junta de Andaluc~iaMinistry of Economy and Knowledge under grant A-SEJ-154-UGR18. The first author's research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under FPU Predoctoral Program [Grant Ref. FPU16/04712] and complementary mobility grant for short stays [Application number EST18/00138]. Interest in business ecosystems has grown exponentially over the last decade. This article focuses on the operational benefits of business ecosystems by investigating how embeddedness in business ecosystems influences supply chain competence. Specifically, it considers the mediating effect of external knowledge capacities (i.e. absorptive, desorptive and connective capacity). Data from 271 European firms in business ecosystems was collected to test the paper’s hypotheses using regression analysis with bootstrapping. Results indicate that business ecosystem embeddedness does not in itself improve supply chain competence. Rather, the relationship is explained through (i) absorptive and desorptive capacity as direct mediators; and (ii) connective capacity, which enhances supply chain competence indirectly by improving external knowledge retention for absorptive and desorptive capacity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to demonstrate benefits of being embedded in business ecosystems other than in terms of innovation. Newly validated scales for business ecosystem embeddedness and connective capacity are provided. 2021-09-28T10:57:45Z 2021-09-28T10:57:45Z 2021-08-05 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Marta Riquelme-Medina... [et al.] (2021). Business ecosystem embeddedness to enhance supply chain competence: the key role of external knowledge capacities, Production Planning & Control, DOI: [10.1080/09537287.2021.1951389] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/70494 10.1080/09537287.2021.1951389 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España Taylor & Francis