How Companies Learn to Collaborate: Emergence of Improved Inter-Organizational Processes in R&D Alliances
研究了合作公司如何通过促进社会化、外化、组合和内化四个知识转化过程，来提升管理双边研发合作的能力，基于全球电信行业105个研发伙伴关系的数据。
Previous research has maintained that the capacity to manage alliances is a distinct capability, defined as the ability to identify, negotiate, manage, monitor and terminate collaborations. This paper focuses on an important but hitherto neglected aspect of alliance capability by investigating how partnering firms may learn how to better manage their dyadic R&D collaborations. In particular, we seek to test the Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) model of dynamic knowledge creation by establishing a link between the facilitation of four knowledge conversion processes – socialization, externalization, combination and internalization – and an improved capability to manage inter-organizational R&D processes. We specify and extend the model by identifying and testing several critical interactions between these knowledge conversion processes. Relying on data from 105 R&D partnerships in the global telecommunications industry, we suggest that the failure to support one of these knowledge conversion processes has the potential to hamper the proper functioning of the other knowledge conversion processes and thus the emergence of capability to manage dyadic R&D collaborations.