KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN STRATEGIC ALLIANCES: THE CONCEPTUAL THINKING OF KNOWLEDGE EMBEDDEDNESS AND RESOURCE EXCHANGE

摘要

One company cannot go alone in current economic environment. The intense and rapid changes in economic activity, technology, and globalisation, have resulted in a significant increase in the use of alliances. In this New World, strategic alliances are not an option but a necessity. Yet, managers are finding it increasingly difficult to capture value from alliances. Although recent evidence shows that an alliance knowledge management capability is both an important component of alliance success and a differentiating factor for effective value creation, the knowledge management problematic has not been systematically and traditionally applied to strategic alliances. In this paper, by examining the importance of knowledge-sharing mechanism (knowledge embeddedness) in strategic alliances and then analysing the critical dimensions of knowledge resource (tacitness, specificity, and complexity), as well as the role of the partner in an industry context (complementor, competitor, supplier, customer, and other), we attempt to focus on a conceptual model that describes the knowledge resource exchange between alliance partners, synthesising the various findings in the literature on alliances, resource and knowledge management from a relational view of the firm in value creation. We also argue that in order to capture and internalise knowledge obtained through an alliance, a firm must have an alliance learning capability.