With the spread of the open innovation paradigm, joining strategic alliances has become a necessary choice for firms to gain a competitive advantage, and the underlying motivation for firms to engage in strategic alliances is to gain access to the vast array of different and complementary knowledge resources that strategic alliances bring together, thereby providing the intellectual underpinnings for technological innovation, through the distribution of their resources by game. The reason for this is that individual firms do not have the full resources and capacity needed for innovative development, and through alliances, firms do not need enormous resources and manpower to acquire new knowledge to build differential competitive advantages. The important role of strategic alliances is increasingly highlighted, especially in the context of the realities of the increasingly uncertain technological and market environment。
Over the past 30 years, scholars have begun to embrace and further develop the knowledge-based strategic alliance perspective, which has been enriched and refined by extensive discussions on the generation, development, evolution and impact of strategic alliances。
First, from a knowledge perspective, strategic alliances are characterized by the dissemination and creation of knowledge, the attraction of broad participation by members, the establishment of close relationships among members and the promotion of knowledge complementarity; second, while enterprises may gain knowledge through strategic alliances, they are more likely to internalize knowledge through knowledge integration, that is, they are motivated not only by knowledge acquisition but, more importantly, by knowledge learning, absorption and rebuilding, which is key to innovation
Finally, the fragmented distribution of knowledge resources within strategic alliances within different constituencies may lead to inefficiencies in alliance knowledge management, thereby affecting alliance corporate performance. As a result, some scholars have explored the implications of knowledge transfer within strategic alliances, such as willingness to transfer knowledge, social ties within alliances, and the level of relationship management. Through these theories, it is clear that since the emergence of the knowledge-base theory, not only has the importance of knowledge for the survival and development of enterprises been emphasized, but there has been a greater focus on the acquisition and integration of knowledge, i. E., what it needs, how it can be acquired and how it can be integrated, thus yielding considerable value gains for enterprises。
In the area of strategic alliances, the doctrine has drawn interesting conclusions from a knowledge-based perspective on the characteristics of strategic alliances, their motivations, factors influencing their transfer. At the same time, the knowledge-based strategic alliance perspective provides a useful theoretical basis for standardized participation by enterprises in the tsa context. The technical standards are a complex set of technology systems, a complete standard text that requires a wide range of knowledge, and few enterprises have the full range of knowledge resources and capabilities needed to set technical standards。
Therefore, enterprises need to participate in the technological standards alliance to capture and integrate the diverse knowledge of alliance partners through the alliance network to achieve technology standardization and innovation objectives. As a result, the knowledge base theory provides a good insight into the motivations of enterprises to participate in tsas and provides a strong theoretical underpinning for the knowledge integration behaviour of enterprises in the sas network。
Content of organizational learning
Penrose's statement in theory of the growth of the fire that learning and integrating knowledge is the foundation of knowledge innovation and enterprise growth is a tacit expression of “organizational learning”. Since cyert and march introduced the concept of organizational learning for the first time on the assumption that “organization can learn”, organizational learning has gradually become a new area of interest for scholars. Agriris and schon believe that organizational learning is a continuous process of correcting errors by revisiting organizational behaviour and embedding results into organizational memory。
In 1990, senge's book the fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization brought the study of organizational learning to a new level, making it a popular field of research. However, there is no consensus among scholars from different backgrounds and fields of research on the definition of organizational learning and on the modalities and processes of organizational learning。
The main views of national and international scholars on the definition of organizational learning are divided into three categories: behavioural processes, environmental interactions and information processing. It is worth noting that the grouping of a definition into a certain category is based on the principal view of the scholar and does not exclude that some of the scholars ' definitions can be grouped into two or even three sets of views。
From these three representative points of view, it can be seen, first, that organizational learning is closely related to outcomes such as the improvement and continuous improvement of organizational performance; secondly, that organizational learning is a series of adaptation and adaptation activities in response to changes in the external environment; and thirdly, that organizational learning is inextricably linked to knowledge acquisition, knowledge transfer, knowledge sharing and storage。
2. Organizational learning process
Many scholars explore the content of organizational learning from different perspectives, based on a different understanding of what organizational learning entails. Among them, slater and naver, based on the research perspective of their predecessors, presented a four-stage model of organizational learning from an information perspective, which was widely recognized and adopted by scholars. Slater and naver believe that organizational learning includes four links: access to information, information sharing, information analysis and organizational memory。
Access to information. Knowledge acquisition is an important component of organizational learning, as organizational learning enriches organizational memory by increasing knowledge inventories and thus realizes the value of knowledge. Knowledge and information can come from both within and outside the organization, as well as from its own memory. Many formal organizational activities (e. G. R & d activities, market surveys, product analysis and performance assessment of competitors, etc.) and informal behaviour (empirical awareness, interpersonal interaction and newspaper browsing, etc.) are aimed at obtaining information or knowledge。
Information sharing. Information sharing expands the breadth of organizational learning and is an important indicator of the difference between organizational learning and learning at a single individual level. In general, organizations with potentially synergetic information do not know where it can be served, while organizational modules that require information often do not know the existence or location of the information, and information-sharing can lead to a convergence of information supply and demand by combining information from different organizational units, not only gaining new information but also gaining new understanding。
Can not open message daft and weick define information analysis as “the process that gives meaning to information, the process of developing a common understanding and conceptual formula”. The development of a common understanding of a given event or information project among organizational units can profoundly influence organizational learning. For example, a more comprehensive understanding could increase cooperation, thereby increasing the scope of potential conduct, or inhibit cooperation, thereby reducing the scope of potential conduct. In either case, a more comprehensive understanding would lead to a change in the scope of potential behaviour, namely organizational learning。
Organizational memory. Organizational memory is the process of storing the organization's historical information and knowledge. Some scholars believe that organizational memory encompasses both physical information and intangible information, such as organizational practices and collective beliefs, and is a repository of knowledge derived from the past and having an impact on the organization's future behaviour and decision-making. In many cases, the organization preserves, retrieves and updates the knowledge and information acquired through information sharing and interpretation in the form of computer files, which, on the one hand, fosters hidden intellectual visibility and, on the other, helps the organization better achieve its objectives。
New developments in organizational learning theory
For a considerable period of time, the focus of research on organizational learning has been on the three levels of an individual team and on the circulation of knowledge between individual, team and organizational levels during organizational learning. The seci model, presented by japanese scholars nonaka and takeucki, is the result of a spiral of organizational learning through the progressive cycles of individuals, teams, organizations, and knowledge transformation through four modes of socialization, externalization, integration and internalization。
However, with the rapid pace of science and technology and the dynamics of the external environment, it is difficult for enterprises to gain access to all the resources needed for development by relying only on intra-organizational learning, in which case they must develop external partnerships in order to gain access to knowledge and strategic resources in a shorter time frame and at a lower cost by working with partner enterprises. As a result, organizational learning theory has gradually expanded to the inter-organizational learning level as research has progressed。
Inter-organizational learning crosses the boundaries of the enterprise, and different enterprises conduct inter-organizational learning through the development of cooperative relationships or strategic alliances, which are important forms of inter-organizational learning. Inter-organizational learning has been studied by scholars from the perspective of transaction costs, the resource base and the knowledge base, which have contributed significantly to the evolution of organizational learning theory。
For example, kogut and zander suggest that inter-organizational learning is an important source of complementary knowledge resources for enterprises, and that inter-organizational learning behaviour, such as inter-firm alliances, can help reduce transaction costs and increase the scope, scale and frequency of knowledge exchange. Bae xudong et al. Noted that relationship learning can contribute to the improvement of enterprise knowledge performance by transferring more relevant knowledge, including tacit knowledge, from partnerships and by integrating different expertise。
