Strategic Alliance Capability: Bringing the Individual Back into Inter-Organizational Collaboration

Internationalization has accelerated the speed of knowledge generation and innovation. Thus, companies increasingly need to pool and create new resources by engaging in alliances with various partners. However, high failure rates of strategic alliances imply that the degree of a company’s collaboration success is related to the level of its alliance capability. While ”alliance capability” has largely been conceptualized from within the resource based and the dynamic capability view, one of the major drawbacks is the lack of microfoundations, i.e. an explanation of individual knowledge and actions, which drive the development of alliance capability. A modified approach to the capability life-cycle is introduced, which aims at filling this gap. Finally, some implications for managerial practice and for future research are addressed. IntroductIon In the global marketplace, competitive advantages have become increasingly difficult to realize and many firms strive for new sources of knowledge and corporate growth. For many companies, strategic alliances have become a cornerstone in their expansion efforts because they facilitate access to new resources and wealth creation. Indeed, strategic alliancesa can be considered a critical issue in the network economy, which is evidenced by both their rise in number and the variety of emerging forms, such as ‘value networks’, ‘alliance networks’ or ‘alliance constellations’ (Gomes-Casseres, 2003; de Man, 2005). Motives for those ‘loosely-coupled arrangements’ (Weick, 1976) include easier access to foreign markets, economies of scale, accelerated development of technological capabilities, risk reduction and the acquisition and transfer of knowledge embedded in respective partners (e.g., Hamel, Doz and Prahalad, 1989; Larsson, Bengtsson et al.