Thomas Weitlaner

Organizational learning processes in international strategic alliances Thomas Weitlaner

Diplomarbeit, die am 01.09.1997 erfolgreich an einer Universität in Österreich im Fachbereich Sozial- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften eingereicht wurde. Abstract: In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of alliances among major corporations throughout the whole world; hardly a day goes by without announcements in the business press of new linkages, partnerships, or alliances. They increasingly involve partners from different parts of the world, are cross-cultural, and don´t seem to have a limit. My curiosity for this phenomenon was captured by the course "Collaborative Strategies in International Business", which I frequented at the Aarhus School of Business, Denmark in 1995. One of the articles, that made up the course literature was Gary Hamel´s "Competition for Competence and Interpartner Learning within International Strategic Alliance" (1991). In this influential paper he investigated which role International Strategic Alliances might play in effecting a partial redistribution of skills amongst partners. Furthermore, he found several determinants that influenced the success of interpartner learning. This study was the point of departure for my work. I just wanted to dig deeper into this topic and find answers to the following questions: What are the motives behind the increasing number of alliance formation? What role does the increasingly popular Resource-Based View of the firm play? How do Organizational Learning processes take shape? Which factors influence the success of learning processes in Strategic Alliances? What are then the managerial implications for the management of collaborative ventures? In the following chapters I try to find some answers to these questions. To this aim my paper will be organized in the following way: In Chapter 2 I will try to explain what a Strategic Alliance is and put forward some definitions. We will see, that this term comprises quite a lot of different forms of interfirm cooperation, from the "classic.