Measuring collective competencies of organisations - a systematic review of literature

The present Systematic Review explores the existing academic literature on theinstruments to measure collective competences of organisations. The purpose is toidentify those that could be further used in a PhD work on the competences oforganisations involved in co-operative R&D projects. This area of research is at theintersection of Strategic Management, Human Resources Management, EvolutionaryEconomics and Business Performance Measurement.The methodology starts with a set of keyword strings for search in bibliographicdatabases. The extracted articles were then filtered for relevance and qualityaccording to pre-defined criteria. An expansion of the resulting list was performedusing cross-referencing and citation analysis. The final core list contains 33 articles.Descriptive statistics illustrate an emergent and highly fragmented field: the numberof articles in the list rises sharply over the last 25 years, but no agreement is reachedon either the nature of the variables to measure nor on the means to do so.The understandings of the concept of competence either aim at classifying firms (in aminority of articles), or at ranking them. In the latter case, the concept is assimilatedto the proximity to best practices, to an efficiency or to an effectiveness in reachingfunctionally defined goals.Four families of methods are used in the existing literature to measure collectivecompetences of organisations: questionnaires, exploitation of secondary data, casestudies and interviews, in descending order of frequency in the core list.The selected articles provide a set of relevant concepts, of methods, of constructs, ofthird-party quantitative metrics and of individual questionnaire items useful for thefurther research.