Surviving learning races: An analysis of strategic alliance evolution capabilities

This paper is aimed to identify and understand the main dimensions and processes that underlie the capacity of weaker firms in an initially unbalanced strategic alliance to purposefully channel the fruitful evolution of the alliance by creating, extending or modifying its scope in order to perceive and grasp new value creating opportunities which they would not be able to seize on their own. We call this capacity an alliance evolution capability and intend it as a particular type of dynamic capability of the firm (Teece, Pisano & Schuen, 1997; Helfat et al., 2007). The motivation for this paper is threefold: (1) to understand how weaker firms may survive learning race alliances (Hamel, 1991…