Learning in Strategic Alliances: An Evolutionary Perspective

Overview: Many firms have come to rely on alliances as strategic necessities for sustaining competitive advantage and creating customer value. Aside from the explicit strategic and operational motives, learning in order to sustain competitive edge in the marketplace serves as a primary motivation for alliance formation. Significant also, alliances evolve over time and metamorphosize as partners learn. Extant strategic alliance literature scarcely addresses this dynamic and interactive aspect. The basic purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of understanding the evolutionary perspective of alliance learning. More specifically, it explores alliance-learning priorities as the partnership unfolds in five key areas: environment, tasks, process, skills, and goals. In addition, the paper investigates some processes/mechanisms that contribute to alliance learning. The article is organized as follows: The first section reviews extant literature to define the concepts of organizational learning and strategic alliances; the next section discusses the learning dimensions in each evolutionary phase. Finally, some research opportunities are suggested for furthering the extant knowledge.

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Format: PDF | Size: 313KB | Date: Jan 2003 | Pages: 16