Do firms learn to create value? The case of alliances

Abstract

We investigate whether firms learn to manage interfirm alliances as experience accumulates. We use contract‐specific experience measures in a data set of over 2000 joint ventures and licensing agreements, and value creation measures derived from the abnormal stock returns surrounding alliance announcements. Learning effects are identified from the effects of unobserved heterogeneity in alliance capabilities. We find evidence of large learning effects in managing joint ventures, but no such evidence for licensing contracts. The effects of learning on value creation are strongest for research joint ventures, and weakest for marketing joint ventures. These results are consistent with the view that learning effects are more important in situations characterized by greater contractual ambiguity. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The role of incentives and communication in strategic alliances: an experimental investigation

“…However, approximately half of all strategic alliances fail (Kale, Dyer, and Singh, 2002). Indeed, the large gap between potential economic value creation and realized economic value creation in strategic alliances suggests that there are formidable impediments to successful alliance outcomes (Anand and Khanna, 2000;Gottschlag and Zollo, 2007).…”

Collaborative Capability of Teams in Network Organizations

“…Effective actions will more likely be repeated in the future. As Anand and Khanna [18] pointed out that one of the most important factors of alliance success is previous experience with alliances. Kale et al [17] argue that alliance experience helps firms to develop a relational capability.…”

Alliance strategy: context, process, and requirements

“…In addition, research has unfolded that successful inter-organizational performance starts within each involved organization. Captured by the concept of alliance capability, previous studies have identified that alliance management success increases by the presence of supportive infrastructural facilities for gathering, generating, institutionalizing, and dispersing alliance management knowledge (Draulans et al, 2003;Kale and Singh, 2009), and stressed the importance of experience in alliance learning (Anand and Khanna, 2000). Researchers argued that such knowledge and experience contribute to the development of interorganizational coordination mechanisms such as trust, and discovered that organizations with such a knowledge base are more successful in alliances than those without (Bamford et al, 2003).…”

“…Referred to as alliance capability, they explored organizational competencies (series of activities and processes) which can positively influence the alliance outcome (Sluyts et al, 2012). Their studies in particular focused on developing alliance capability by means of learning from past collaborative experience to overcome future challenges (Anand and Khanna, 2000). Since an organizational capability usually acts as a co-specialized element in the organizational system (Vesalainen and Hakala, 2014), alliance capability not only depends on organizational learning capability.…”

“…Referred to as alliance capability, they explore organizational competencies (series of activities and processes) which can positively influence alliance outcome (Sluyts et al, 2012). Their studies in particularly focus on developing alliance capability by means of learning from past collaborative experience to overcome future challenges (Anand and Khanna, 2000;Simonin, 1997). The alliance capability literature exemplifies that organizational learning capability is developed by combining competencies at the organizational, group and individual level to effectively capture, institutionalize, and share alliance management know-how within organizational boundaries (Argote, 2013;Hsu and Chang, 2014;Von Krogh et al, 2012;Zollo and Winter, 2002).…”