Building firm capabilities through learning: the role of the alliance learning process in alliance capability and firm-level alliance success (original) (raw)
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Developing alliance capabilities: an empirical study
Academy of Management …, 2005
This paper assesses the differential performance effects of learning mechanisms on the development of alliance capabilities. Prior research has suggested that different capability levels could be identified in which specific intra-firm learning mechanisms are used to enhance a firm's alliance capability. However, empirical testing in this field is scarce and little is known as to what extent different learning mechanisms are indeed useful in advancing a firm's alliance capability. This paper analyzes to what extent intra-firm learning mechanisms help firms develop their alliance capability. Differential learning may explain in what way firms yield superior returns from their alliances in comparison to competitors. The empirical results show that different learning mechanisms have different performance effects at different stages of the alliance capability development process. The main lesson from this paper is that firms can steer the creation and speed of their alliance capability development as different learning mechanisms have differential performance effects and are more appropriate at different levels of alliance capability.
International Journal of Management Reviews, 2014
ABSTRACT The literature on alliances has identified a variety of inter-firm antecedents of performance, including information and knowledge sharing between partners, shared partner understanding, and a focus on collective objectives. Recent studies have focused on alliance management capabilities (AMC) – firms' abilities to capture, share, store and apply alliance management knowledge – as an important antecedent of performance. This paper reviews 90 studies on AMC and makes two important contributions to the literature. First, the review provides an overview of and classification scheme for the different types of AMC to better organise the diverse empirical findings that have been presented in the literature. The novel classification distinguishes between general and partner-specific AMC and between AMC stored within the firm and within the alliance. Second, consistent with the dynamic capabilities perspective, this paper offers a more detailed understanding of why AMC improve performance, by highlighting the intermediate impact of AMC on alliance attributes. In particular, the review demonstrates how the different categories of AMC influence alliances in terms of information and knowledge-sharing between partners, shared partner understanding and the pursuit of collective goals. The review also demonstrates that these attributes improve performance. The authors note promising avenues for future empirical research that involve combining the classification scheme with research on the impact of AMC on alliance attributes and performance.
Building capabilities to manage strategic alliances
Industrial Marketing Management, 2011
In recent years, academics have attributed alliance success to a firm's ability to successfully manage their alliances, also called their level of alliance capability. We like to contribute to this growing body of literature by (1) verifying the impact of alliance capability on alliance performance and (2) analyzing the drivers of alliance capability. We measure alliance capability through four types of alliance learning processes and study how each of these processes affect alliance outcome. Furthermore, we take into account several possible drivers of alliance capability such as organizational culture, strategic commitment of the top team, experience and alliance management approach. We refine the results by examining how these factors affect each of the four learning processes underpinning alliance capability. Our research model will be tested on a sample of 189 Belgian companies.
Pers Indiv Differ, 2003
This study centers around the way in which firms can enhance alliance performance through the development of an alliance capability. Whereas most research has focused on inter-firm antecedents of alliance performance (i.e. factors influencing the quality of the relationship), research on intra-firm antecedents points to prior experience and internal mechanisms fostering knowledge transfer. As little is known about how firms need to develop an alliance capability, this study aims to uncover the relationships between critical concepts underlying the alliance capability development process. To this end, the results of a worldwide survey among 151 firms and expert interviews yield a number of findings. First, a model of alliance capability development is proposed which is derived from a multitude of theories and links experience, microlevel mechanisms, routines, capabilities and performance. Second, whereas prior research has shown that experience is a key determinant of alliance performance, our study finds that alliance capability mediates between experience and performance. These results provide empirical evidence of the need for firms to leverage prior experience by dispersing and sharing knowledge through micro-level mechanisms. These results extend current understanding of the critical intra-firm determinants of alliance performance and the underpinnings of capability development research in general. Moreover, they also enable firms to take appropriate action at the microlevel.
Learning and Innovation in Strategic Alliances
Drawing on knowledge-based, organizational learning, and social capital perspectives, we propose and test an integrated framework in which knowledge tacitness and trust act as mediating mechanisms in the relationship between partner characteristics and alliance outcomes. We distinguish between learning and innovation outcomes and suggest that while innovation may result from alliance learning, it can also be created by combining separate knowledge bases without learning from each other. We contend that tacitness and trust play differing roles in the pursuit of learning and innovation and test this proposition on a sample of 120 international strategic alliances.
2016
1.INTRODUCTIONFor the last few decades a number of various types of collaboration between independent firms have been growing steadily (Harbison & Pekar, 1998, Anand & Khanna, 2000), and many of these collaborations have been developed under the umbrella of strategic alliances. In highly competitive global market, especially with the recession over last decade, strategic alliance has become an important way in achieving sustainable competitive advantage and strategic success (Parkhe, 1991). Strategic alliance can be analyzed as an organizational form in which independent organizations share the benefits of partnership in key strategic areas such as product design, production, marketing, distribution, technology (Arend & Amid 2005, Gulati 1998) and thus share the risk and costs of ongoing collaboration. Alternatively, strategic alliance is based on voluntary cooperative agreements of two or more firms to reach a common goal entailing the pooling of their resources and facilities (Par...
Value creation and success in strategic alliances
European Management Journal, 2001
The authors use evidence from more than 200 organizations to demonstrate how companies which invest in alliance structures to co-ordinate alliance activity and systems to capture, codify, communicate and coach alliance-related know-how, definitely reap benefit in a number of ways. They also provide guidance on alternative ways to organize alliance structure and learning and co-ordination systems. The path to these benefits is not easy and companies need resources, people, and caution in managing the dedicated alliance function.
Building Alliance Capability: Management Techniques for Superior Alliance Performance
Long Range Planning - LONG RANGE PLANN, 2003
Despite the fact that they represent a growing element of business strategy, alliances between organisations quite often result in failure. This is partly due to the fact that firms have not built up adequate capabilities to manage alliances. Special management techniques have to be implemented in order to strengthen the organisation’s alliance capability. This article evaluates a number of these techniques with regard to their impact on alliance success, and reports on a quantitative study on alliances and alliance-management techniques of 46 large companies to assess this impact.
Understanding the impact of relational capital and organizational learning on alliance outcomes
Journal of World Business, 2010
This paper examines how relational capital influences the acquisition of knowledge among alliance partners. We propose that firms with higher levels of inter-and intrafirm learning are better able to achieve superior alliance outcomes. A conceptual framework is developed by integrating the relational view, organizational learning theory, and the resource-based view. We provide empirical evidence using large-sample data to test the model and find that trust and interaction creates a basis for knowledge acquisition across alliance partners. The results also indicate that when the firms are active in knowledge acquisition from alliance partners and dissemination of such knowledge within the organization, they are capable of enhancing satisfaction with the alliance relationship. ß