International alliance formation and stock market responses:: Industry globalization as an environmental contingency

This study examines the effects of the degree of industry globalization on international alliance formation in terms of the type of alliance chosen by partner firms and stock market responses to the chosen type of alliance. Using a sample of 244 international alliances formed between U.S. and non-U.S. firms for the 1992–97 period, we find that nonjoint venture (joint venture) alliances take place relatively more frequently in global (multidomestic) industries than in multidomestic (global) industries. We also find that in global industries, abnormal returns to nonjoint venture partners are relatively greater than those to joint venture partners, whereas in multidomestic industries, abnormal returns to nonjoint venture partners are relatively smaller, though insignificant, than those to joint venture partners. Our findings suggest that the degree of industry globalization plays an important role in explaining which type of international alliance is likely to be chosen by partner firms when entering an alliance and how stock markets tend to respond to the chosen type of alliance.     

The effect of alliance experience and intellectual capital on the value creation of international strategic alliances

This paper investigates the effects of intellectual capital (IC), alliance experience and their interaction on the value creation of international strategic alliances (ISAs). Based on a sample of ISAs formed by US firms, we find that firms with a higher level of IC receive greater announcement-period wealth gains. In addition, the empirical results suggest experience positively enhances the wealth effect of ISAs. Finally, we find a significant positive interaction effect between experience and IC on the wealth creation of ISAs. The results demonstrate the importance of considering the joint effects of IC and experience in assessing the value creation of ISAs.     

Is experience valuable in international strategic alliances?

This study investigates whether firms benefit from prior alliance experiences as they undertake international strategic alliances. Different from previous studies that mostly focus on equity joint ventures, this study investigates non-equity alliances. This specific investigation is essential, because the complexity and uncertainty associated with such alliances potentially magnify the benefits of experiential learning. With a sample of 629 international, non-equity alliances formed by US firms, our results confirm the contribution of ISA experience in general, as well as that of experience specific to partner's country of origin and alliance activity type. The results also reveal a contingent benefit of ISA experiences, where experience of technological cooperation and experience with alliance partners from emerging countries both add more to firm value. We derive consistent evidence, as performance is assessed either by the market's perception of ISA value creation, or by the post announcement operating earnings in practice.     

Alliance governance choices: Disentangling the effects of uncertainty and alliance experience

This article analyses the interaction between alliance experience and behavioural uncertainty to improve our understanding of alliance governance. We investigate the extent to which the effect of alliance experience on governance choices is explained by a reduction in “mundane” transaction costs or by a reduction in “opportunistic” transaction costs. Based on more than 12,000 firm experiences with equity and non-equity alliances, we demonstrate a reduction in mundane transaction costs over time by firms reusing the same governance structure in successive alliances. We also find that in high behavioural uncertainty alliances, firms rely on their experience as a substitute for equity governance to reduce opportunistic transaction costs.     

New CEO Openness to Change and Strategic Persistence: The Moderating Role of Industry Characteristics

Drawing on the upper echelons, managerial discretion and strategic contingency perspectives we examine the relationships between newly chosen CEOs' openness to change and firm strategic persistence in the post-succession phase. This study is different from prior studies on the consequences of CEO succession in that it focuses on specific characteristics of the new CEO (that reflect his/her knowledge-base and cognitive orientations) and the industry context rather than purely on the event of succession. Based on a sample of 132 successions in 118 firms in the US manufacturing sector, and after controlling for industry concentration, board power, firm size and pre-succession performance, we find a negative relationship between CEOs' openness to change and post-succession strategic persistence. Interestingly, our findings indicate that this relationship is moderated by industry characteristics in that the negative association between CEO openness to change and strategic persistence is significant in high-discretion but not in low-discretion industries. Contributions of the paper to the CEO succession and strategic change literatures along with the managerial implications of our findings are discussed in the concluding section of the paper.     

联盟管理实践获取与联盟成功：被调节的中介效应

近年来,企业间战略联盟在全世界范围内越来越普遍。联盟的高失败率使企业界和理论界人士开始关注如何实现联盟成功。在长期的联盟活动中,联盟企业都积累了各自独特的一整套被称为联盟管理实践的方法、流程和技能,以提高联盟管理能力、实现联盟预期目标。依据组织学习和关系理论,联盟企业能够从合作伙伴那里获取有价值的联盟管理实践并将其应用于自身的联盟管理活动,这一过程必然有益于联盟管理。然而,鲜有研究探讨联盟管理实践获取行为对联盟成功的影响。 基于以上考虑,引入联盟管理能力和共同行动两个概念,分别作为中介变量和调节变量,构建一个被调节的中介效应模型,以更好地揭示联盟管理实践获取对联盟成功的作用机理。为了检验上述被调节的中介效应模型及相关的作用机理,利用从中国大陆收集的调研数据进行实证研究。最终的样本包含205家联盟企业,且每家企业有两位关键信息提供者,综合采用逐步线性回归和被调节的路径分析方法验证假设。 研究结果表明,联盟管理实践获取通过联盟管理能力这一中介机制最终促进联盟成功,共同行动正向调节联盟管理能力与联盟成功的关系,存在假设中的被调节的中介效应。也就是说,联盟管理实践获取对联盟成功的影响需要通过提升联盟管理能力来实现;同时,联盟双方共同行动水平越高,这一过程越容易实现。 联盟管理实践获取为解释联盟成功的作用机理提供了一个新的视角,拓展了联盟管理能力方面的研究,尤其表现为同时关注联盟管理能力的前因和结果,将组织学习理论和关系理论统一整合到联盟成功研究的框架下,这可视为两大理论的创新性应用。此外,研究结果为现实中联盟企业实现联盟成功指出一条新路,即从合作伙伴处获取有价值的联盟管理实践以促进联盟成功。     

Evolution of strategic management: The need for new dominant designs

The development of strategic management is explained from an evolutionary perspective on the basis of cycles of variation, selection and retention. In industry, breakthrough innovations, or technological discontinuities, initiate eras of ferment that end when a generally accepted standard, or dominant design, starts an era of incremental change. In strategic management, the original definition of strategy initiated an era of ferment characterized by a focus on the environment. The attention to the environment of firms and the integration with other areas of inquiry reached a point of maturity with development of a widely accepted model for analyzing industry and with the definition of generic strategies. The resource-based view of the firm created a new era of ferment by affirming that the main sources of sustainable competitive advantages reside in the development and use of valuable resources. A new period, marked by swift advances in technology and increasingly blurred boundaries among industries, markets and competitors as well as diverse and more complex sources of competitive advantages, imposes on scholars and practitioners an imperative need to conceive new dominant designs. This paper illustrates the evolution toward new directions and challenges of creating new dominant paradigms in strategic management that revolve around the concepts of knowledge, learning, and innovation.     

The Alliance formation process

While interest in developing strategic alliances within the food system continues to increase, there remains considerable risk when firms adopt such a cooperative strategy. The risk is due in part to the lack of concrete guidelines that illustrate the steps or stages of alliance development and the important strategic and operational decisions required at each stage. The existence of such guidelines would facilitate alliance formation and enable managers and researchers to better understand alliance practice. This paper provides an alliance formation model that incorporates the process of alliance formation with the strategic and operational considerations required for long term success. The model can be used by managers and academicians to develop and understand alliances.     

The wisdom and madness of crowds: How information networks and board cognition help or hinder firm performance across the business cycle

We know little of why a minority of firms pursue counter-cyclical strategies and consequently outperform competitors during recessions. Based on the theory of institutional isomorphism, we hypothesize that these firms avoid the mimetic and normative pressures that promote strategic convergence during uncertainty. We demonstrate these effects at the board-level in a sample of 1,615 U.S. firms. Mimetic processes are evident, with firms' connectedness in board interlock networks attenuating profitability and decreasing firm value during recessions—a reversal of the positive effects during expansions. Normative pressures arise from homogeneity in directors’ educational and professional experience, with greater consequences for long-term performance. Overall, recessionary performance is improved when firms occupy relatively isolated positions in informational networks and appoint directors from a range of backgrounds.     

Value‐enhancing Learning from Industry‐wide Diversification Experience

Diversification is an important strategic decision and a rare event. By definition, when undertaking a new diversification, a firm will not have direct internal experience of the venture. In this regard, external experience of similar diversifications provides a valuable lesson pool for the focal manager. While there are many studies of internal learning in organizational learning literature, research on external learning is still scarce. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for external experiential learning and applies it to a study of the effect of industry experience on diversification value. It reports the novel finding of a cubic relationship between external learning from industry experience and diversification value. This indicates that industry experience matters to the outcomes of strategic decisions, but that the effect of this external experience on learning is conditional upon certain characteristics of the experience: namely, specificity and heterogeneity.     

The Dynamics of Research Alliances: Examining the Effect of Alliance Experience and Partner Characteristics on the Speed of Alliance Entry in the Biotech Industry

Few studies have moved beyond the dyadic level of an ongoing alliance and examined factors contributing to the success of entering a series of alliances. In this paper we expect biotechnology firms over time to learn from their alliance experience and to develop general alliance capabilities. Specifically, we expect the speed with which they enter into new research alliances, e.g. their alliance formation rate, to be affected by capabilities built up in prior alliances as well as by characteristics of their partners. We use longitudinal event history data for the complete population of US biotechnology firms for 1973–1999 to test four hypotheses about factors affecting the rate of new alliance formation. Our analysis suggests that the speed of entering research alliances is affected by prior experience of the focal firm, but not by partner characteristics. Our findings provide evidence that biotech firms learn how to learn more effectively from multiple research alliances; however, this effect is generalized and not tied to specific characteristics of the alliance partner.     

A learning perspective on the offshoring of advanced services

Based on longitudinal case studies of offshoring of advanced IT and engineering services from Danish firms to Indian firms, this paper explores organizational learning that occurs over time in both home and host firms and uses learning as a measure of the firm impact of advanced services offshoring. The findings are consistent with the theoretical view that advanced services offshoring must be understood as an antecedent for strategic business development and organizational change in both home and host firms. The study shows that when offshoring partnerships mature and firms gain experience, learning in both home and host firms evolves over time and differs in many cases from their initial objectives and expectations. In some of the Danish firms engaging in offshoring even ignites a process of strategic transformation. Both Danish and Indian firms use the input from their offshoring partnership to upgrade their organizations and business processes.     

TD-SCDMA与电信行业标准竞争的战略选择

本文以第3代移动通信标准TD-SCDMA及其产业化过程为对象,运用理论分析、案例研究和网络分析的方法,研究了TD-SCDMA标准产业化过程及其影响因素,分析了联盟策略、政府作用对于产业链成熟度的影响。比较了TD-SCDMA标准与其他两大产业标准的网络结构。分析了电信行业标准竞争的战略选择和效果。     

竞争性战略联盟外生合作效应的实证研究

由竞争对手组建的竞争性战略联盟,正逐渐成为联盟理论研究的焦点。由于这类联盟的参与企业是同行业中的直接竞争对手,所以联盟对行业结构将产生重要影响。为了评价这些影响,本文首先讨论了竞争性战略联盟能够产生的市场效应的主要内容,然后识别和归纳了这些效应的主要影响因素,最后利用国内企业的调研数据,应用结构方程模型对效应之间、效应与影响因素之间的相关关系进行了实证检验。研究结果表明,竞争性战略联盟所处的外部行业环境显著影响着联盟结构模式的选择,并对其外生合作效应发挥着部分影响作用,同时联盟的结构模式对合作效应也具有显著影响。     

Entrepreneurial orientation in vertical alliances: joint product innovation and learning from allies

This paper clarifies how a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO) affects joint product innovation within a vertical alliance and how this is influenced by increasing technological uncertainty and the absorption of knowledge from the alliance partners. The results of a structural equation model with latent interactions on 171 firms in the manufacturing industry indicate that the focal firm’s EO increases joint innovation, although this positive effect declines when a high level of uncertainty increases. On the other hand, the ability to absorb partners’ knowledge increases joint product innovation. As such, this study’s results contribute to research in the field of vertical alliances, EO, and the theoretical foundation of a dynamic capability perspective.     

Strategic technology alliance termination: An empirical investigation

There is growing consensus that overall alliance termination rates are high. However, despite this track record of termination and despite unsurpassed growth rates of strategic technology alliances, little is known about the reasons for their termination. Typically strategic alliances have been characterized as inherently instable, i.e. often involving unplanned and premature termination of the alliance by partnering firms indicating alliance failure. The literature on strategic technology alliances, however, proposes that alliance termination does not always indicate failure, but can be intended and can be a sign of strength. We examine these different perceptions by using a sample of 48 strategic technology alliances in different high-technology industries. The findings in the paper confirm that the rates of termination are rather high for strategic technology alliances. Overall, we found that in particular negative prospects about future cooperation, negative perceptions about joint benefits and the lack of a win-win situation had an impact on the decision to terminate a strategic technology alliance. Also, the fact that some companies opt only for short-term (not for long-term and renewed) cooperation seems to introduce a negative factor into the longevity of strategic technology alliances.     

Building dynamic capabilities for digital transformation: An ongoing process of strategic renewal

In this qualitative study, we explore how incumbent firms in traditional industries build dynamic capabilities for digital transformation. Digital transformation has been defined as the use of new digital technologies, such as mobile, artificial intelligence, cloud, blockchain, and the Internet of things (IoT) technologies, to enable major business improvements to augment customer experience, streamline operations, or create new business models. In making sense of digital transformation, we discovered that leaders in various industry circles use the term inconsistently to describe various strategizing and organizing activities; in addition, the term has gained limited scholarly attention as a context for study of strategic change. Drawing on senior executives' experiences with leading digitalization projects at incumbent firms, we propose a process model comprising of nine microfoundations to reveal the generic contingency factors that trigger, enable, and hinder the building of dynamic capabilities for digital transformation. Our findings reveal that digital transformation is an ongoing process of using new digital technologies in everyday organizational life, which recognizes agility as the core mechanism for the strategic renewal of an organization's (1) business model, (2) collaborative approach, and eventually the (3) culture.     

Making more of alliance portfolios: The role of alliance portfolio coordination

Alliance portfolios enable firms to access and integrate multiple resources from different, simultaneous partners. We assess the extent to which alliance portfolio coordination benefits focal firms along three alliance portfolio characteristics: alliance portfolio size, the complementarity of the resources available through the portfolio, and the degree to which relation-specific investments are made across the portfolio. Based on a questionnaire completed by 444 Dutch companies, we found that the three portfolio characteristics play an important role in creating benefits for focal firms through their portfolios. Additionally, our findings suggest that alliance portfolio coordination is an important element in dealing with the challenge of managing portfolios, in that it shapes the effect of the other portfolio characteristics.     

Shades of gray: effect of external work arrangements on firm performance under operational and strategic contingencies

This study builds on recent research on the external workforce by examining the effects of (1) temporary work (2) independent contracting, and (3) consulting on firm performance, considering the client firms’ tasks, the qualification requirements for carrying out these tasks, and its strategic context. The findings are based on a survey of 261 firms in the German manufacturing industry. At the operational level, the results indicate that the difficulty of the tasks to be performed by external workers influences their performance. Whilst temporary work and consulting are better suited for simple tasks with low qualification requirements, independent contracting increases firm performance when appointing individuals to perform complex tasks. At the strategic level we research effects by two strategic orientations; one generally increasing the internal innovation performance (innovation orientation), the other generally increasing the performance of external relationships (alliance orientation). The innovation orientation here reduces the negative effect of temporary work, whereas a high alliance orientation precipitates a positive effect of consulting on firm performance. This paper demonstrates that clients’ task requirements and their alignment towards innovation and alliances have a significant influence on the benefits to the firm conveyed by highly qualified externals.     

战略阻绝效应对战略联盟决策的影响分析

本文将对战略联盟决策的分析纳入SCP范式,并通过构造在位者和潜在进入者之间的三阶段博弈模型来分析战略阻绝效应对战略联盟决策的影响.本文认为:在位者的合适的战略联盟行为具有战略阻绝效应,可以通过改变潜在进入者的进入预期、影响进入者的行为并促进在位者的支付,这种支付的改变将拓宽战略联盟的决策空间,在位者将在更高的联盟成本或更低的固定边际成本下降程度上建立战略联盟.