| dc.description.abstract | The present day business environment is characterized with ever - accelerating
developments and their direct impact on productivity improvements, making many
floriculture firms to radically re-thinking their strategies and how to implement them.
Many floriculture firms have adopted various strategies such as strategic business
alliances, diversification, mergers and acquisitions. Globalization has made it
strategically important for floriculture firms to be able to work closely with other
floriculture firms across corporate and geographic borders. The objective of the study
was to determine the role of strategic business network for competitive advantage in the
floriculture firms in lower eastern region; Kenya. The study adopted a cross sectional
survey research design. The population of the study all the seven floriculture firms with
their operations in the Lower Eastern Region, Kenya. The study used primary data
collected through self-administered questionnaire. Data was analyzed using the Statistical
Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software and presented using percentages, tables and
graphs. The findings of the study were that all the floriculture firms use strategic business
networking. The success of strategic business networking among the firms was as a result
of planning, clearly understood roles, clearly defined, shared goals and objectives,
communication between partners: maintaining relationships, senior management are
committed, frequent performance feedback, maintaining broad strategic vision and
managers create an environment of trust. The benefits of floriculture firms pursuing
strategic business networking was found to be increased access to markets, better
resource utilization, synergy and competitive advantage, improve organizational learning,
flexibility development, financial risks sharing, firm’s innovation process contribution
and shortening of development cycles. The study found out that strategic business
networking enables floriculture firms to achieve competitive advantage through unique
resources, superior quality of services, unique corporate culture, speed of offering
services, flexibility, added value, products and service diversity, strategic alliances that
enables the floriculture firms to access complementary resources and skills that reside in
other floriculture firms, creation and sustaining fruitful collaborations and managing
strategic business alliances more than competitors. | en |
