Creating Knowledge through Collaboration

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Although many firms enter strategic alliances with specific learning objectives, these objectives are often not realized. Drawing on a study of North American-Japanese joint ventures, this article analyzes the question of why some firms are more effective than others at exploiting alliance learning opportunities and develops a framework for alliance learning. The framework incorporates knowledge management processes—a set of organizational actions that establish the basis for accessing and exploiting alliance knowledge—and facilitating faaors—the conditions that promote a favorable climate for effective alliance knowledge management. The primary obstacle to successfully learning from alliances is a failure to execute the specifie organizational processes necessary to access, assimilate, and disseminate alliance knowledge.