The evolution of cooperation in strategic alliances: Initial conditions or learning processes?
通过纵向案例研究，分析了战略联盟中学习（环境、任务、流程、技能、目标）如何调节初始条件与联盟结果之间的关系，发现成功联盟经历学习、重新评估和调整的互动循环，而失败联盟则表现出惯性或学习偏差。
We examine how the learning, along several dimensions (environment, task, process, skills, goals), that takes place in strategic alliances between firms mediates between the initial conditions and the outcomes of these alliances. Through a longitudinal case study of two projects in one alliance, replicated and extended in another four projects in two alliances, a framework was developed to analyze the evolution of cooperation in strategic alliances. Successful alliance projects were highly evolutionary and went through a sequence of interactive cycles of learning, reevaluation and readjustment. Failing projects, conversely, were highly inertial, with little learning, or divergent learning between cognitive understanding and behavioral adjustment, or frustrated expectations. Although strategic alliances may be a special case of organizational learning, we believe analyzing the evolution of strategic alliances helps transcend too simple depictions of inertia and adaptation, in particular by suggesting that initial conditions may lead to a stable ‘imprinting’ of fixed processes that make alliances highly inertial or to generative and evolutionary processes that make them highly adaptive, depending on how they are set.