ABSTRACT

One of the established results in the literature on strategic alliances stresses that firms learn from each other and, as such, alliances are important means through which knowledge flows in industries. The alleged positive relation between alliances and learning has resulted in a vast amount of research carried out to determine the conditions and contexts which facilitate learning processes. In this chapter, we focus on three factors which can be important: the duration, the scope of the alliance and the initial technological overlap between partners. Our results reveal that initial technological overlap has a positive relation with learning, and there is an inverted-U relation between learning and alliance duration.