Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

While organizational learning and strategic alliances constitute two separate and equally rich domains of research, there is a growing interest in how organizations learn from their network of alliances and partners, in how knowledge gained from collaborative endeavors can become a source of competitive advantage, and in how one can develop superior collaborative know-how. This chapter builds upon, while pushing beyond, prior attempts to identify and organize the contributions to date (e.g., Tiemessen et al., 1997 ; Inkpen, 2001 ; Lyles and Dhanaraj, 2003 ). Our view and proposed model of alliances constitute an attempt to develop a meta-theory of collaborative learning, one that accounts for, and is meaningful to, all types of organization (from non-profit to for-profit), all levels of learning and knowledge management (at the level of individuals, teams, organizations, and networks), and for different collaborative foci (from intra-organizational to inter-organizational). Upon hearing about the recent remarriage of a friend, Samuel Johnson declared: “This is the triumph of hope over reason.” Like Johnson's hopeful friend, more and more firms engage in repeated alliances with, at best, mixed success. In the corporate world, the number of alliances has increased greatly over the latter half of the 1980s and 1990s ( Bleeke and Ernst, 1991 ; Hennart, 1991 ; Lorange and Roos, ... log in or subscribe to read full text