Using an organizational learning perspective, we develop arguments about vicarious learning through board interlocks and its relation to experiential learning. Although it is well established that firms learn from board interlocks, little attention has focused on which types of interlocks are most consequential and why. We distinguish between the relative advantages of various tie attributes such as experience, authority, and credibility and argue that these distinctions lead to measureable differences in learning outcomes. We further demonstrate that whether vicarious learning substitutes or complements focal firm experiential learning depends upon the type of interlock involved. After accounting for the endogeneity of ties, we find support for our framework in a longitudinal analysis of foreign investments by German firms in emerging economies between 1990 and 2003.

An important focus of the research on mergers and acquisitions is the conditions under which acquisitions create value for the acquiring firm's shareholders. Given that the acquisition process is plagued by serious issues of information asymmetry, which are exacerbated in the context of knowledge acquisitions, we examine whether prior alliances with potential targets reduce the information asymmetry enough to create "partnerspecific absorptive capacity" and yield superior stock returns on acquisition, compared with acquisitions not preceded by alliances. We test our hypotheses on a sample of high-technology acquisitions by U.S. firms during 1990-1998 using an event study methodology to assess abnormal stock returns. We find, unexpectedly, that no significant general effect emerges for acquisitions with prior alliances. However, international acquisitions following alliances show significantly better returns relative to both acquisitions without prior alliances and domestic acquisitions. Additionally, stronger forms of prior alliances lead to better acquisition performance than weaker forms of alliances. Together, the results broadly support our thesis that partner-specific absorptive capacity may be at work and suggest that under certain prior alliance conditions, acquisitions can indeed create value for acquirers.

We explore how firms protect themselves from the risks of knowledge spillover to indirectly connected rivals in a network of interorganizational ties. We argue that the safeguards to limit opportunistic behavior by directly linked firms in a dyad, which have been the focus of extant research, are insufficient to overcome extra-dyadic leakage risks. Instead, firms terminate or avoid ties that expose their knowledge to indirectly linked rivals ("pruning" and "grafting") and embed themselves in dense networks ("closing") to prevent strategic knowledge spillover. Through a longitudinal study of German board interlocks during 1990-2003, we find that firms are more likely to prune, graft, and close their networks as they accumulate strategic knowledge and as the firms to which they are interlocked increasingly generate indirect ties to competitors, even when controlling for dyadic safeguards discussed by prior research. We capture strategic knowledge by tracking firms' experience in the former Warsaw Pact countries from immediately after the sudden fall of communism in 1990 until 2003. The study introduces indirect links to rivals as a source of knowledge spillover in networks, shows how firms deal with extra-dyadic risks, and provides a defensive explanation for the evolution of network composition and structure.

P lentiful research suggests that embeddedness in alliance networks influences firms' innovativeness. This research, however, has mostly overlooked the fact that interorganizational ties are themselves embedded within larger institutional contexts that can shape the effects of networks on organizational outcomes. We address this gap in the literature by arguing that national institutions affect the extent to which specific network positions, such as brokerage, influence innovation. We explore this idea in the context of corporatism, which fosters an institutional logic of collaboration that influences the broker's ability to manage its partnerships and recombine the knowledge residing in its network as well as the extent of knowledge flows among network participants. We argue that differences in institutional logics lead brokerage positions to exert different effects on firm innovativeness. We propose that the firm spanning structural holes obtains the greatest innovation benefits when the firm (the broker) or its alliance partners are based in highly corporatist countries, or under certain combinations of broker and partner corporatism. We find support for these ideas through a longitudinal study of cross-border fuel cell technology alliance networks involving 109 firms from nine countries between 1981 and 2001.

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Acquisitions can dramatically reshape interorganizational networks by combining previously separate nodes and allowing the acquirer to inherit the target’s ties, potentially creating network synergy. Network synergy is the extent to which combining an acquirer’s and a target’s networks through node collapse results in a more favorable structural position for the combined firm as the acquirer gains control of the target’s existing ties. We hypothesize that the likelihood of selecting a target increases when the expected network synergy is greater. Using data from the biotechnology industry (1995–2007), we find support for this hypothesis by showing that acquirers prefer targets that generate greater expected increases in network status and greater expected access to structural holes—even when we control for other known sources of synergies. We further show that these effects are driven by complementary combinations of the acquirer’s and target’s networks that go beyond the attractiveness of the target’s network per se. By integrating the networks and acquisitions literatures, we introduce a novel source of synergies, provide evidence of a previously unexplored mechanism of network change, and show how firms can exert agency in the process of network change.

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