This article identifies the knowledge and skills required for understanding and abstracting inter-organizational network through network diagrams. A practical exercise was applied to 102 business administration students asking them to draw a network diagram based on the transcripts of the statements of central actors in a viniculture network. The pre-analysis of the answers revealed critical aspects for inter-organizational network abstraction. This reflection helped define the required codes to explore the material through content analysis: abstraction of organizations with same function in the network; abstraction of the network's macro-processes; abstraction of the central actor of network. Besides identifying the students' great difficulty in abstracting and understanding inter-organizational networks, the research revealed of some of the required critical competencies: knowledge and skills related to entities and their relationships, such as those obtained by the use of construction techniques; knowledge and skills related to business processes, especially activities of decomposing and synthesizing processes.
inter-organizational network; network diagram; cognitive map
