Business Networks and Performance: A Spatial Approach

networking is not associated to high growth in employment or total sales but there is
evidence implying that networking affects the rate at which the geographic extension of
the firm’s markets occurs.

Section 2 provides a review of the business networking literature. An attempt is made to
provide a typology of business networks based on all different classifications of
business networks found in the international literature. Furthermore, the possible effects
of business networking on business performance are reviewed. Section 3 attempts to
provide a theoretical framework for researching the effect of business networks on
business performance and, as a result, on regional development. The terminal question
and hypothesis that will be indirectly researched concerns with the role of business
networks as an important ‘aspatial’ factor of regional development. The following
section 4 presents the results of a survey of 100 businesses in the manufacturing and
services sectors in two areas of Greece (one remote and one more accessible). It is used
to test empirically the effects of the spatial features of the business-network relationship
on firm performance.

2. A typology of Business Networks

Business networks can be classified into several types each containing certain categories
according and resulting from the point of view networks are researched and seen.
Various types of networks arise when researchers study the nature of flows, the
network’s strength (centrality), its spatial and distant coverage (reachability/length of
network) and the type of relationships on which the network is based.

2.1 Network Nature

This is actually a classification of the kind and nature of what it flows through the
network and the scope of maintaining or accessing a network. Recently, research effort
has been directed in the study of information flow and knowledge transfer through
networks and the operation of the network as a resource for the promotion of innovation
(Grabher, cited in Murdoch 2000, p.414). A very rough classification of what it flows
through the network may be the following:

> Products or services. The scope is trade: Upstream (inputs) or downstream (output)
exchange of products-services

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