| Summary: | 碩士 === 逢甲大學 === 國際貿易所 === 99 === The current shifts in the global business environment, various strategic issues faced by the companies that are willing to expand abroad or achieve higher profitability require substantial investments and commitments. However, internal resources are not always enough for an effective competition with large international companies that have greater experience of performing on a global scale. Therefore, cooperative relations, strategic alliances in particular, become one of the main tools to which companies resort in order to learn, acquire and develop new knowledge and skills. The basic purpose of this paper is to portray and analyze the importance of learning and knowledge transfer in strategic alliances created in the context of emerging markets, Russia and Taiwan in particular, and to identify the influence of relational capital factors on the effectives of learning in strategic alliances.
The paper is organized in the following way. First, we give the definition of international strategic alliance (ISA); discuss the importance of ISA in the emerging markets context, and possible motives inducing the companies located in emerging markets to establish strategic cooperative relationships. Next, we review the extant literature on strategic alliances and organizational learning, develop the theoretical framework that underlies the whole process of the present study, and make some propositions. Finally, conducting case study to test the model and relying on the obtained results we make some conclusions, highlight implications, and draw final propositions about the possible directions for futures researches.
The results of the performed empirical research showed that the main driver determining the propensity of the companies located in the emerging markets, in our case Russia and Taiwan, to establish strategic alliances is learning intent. More specifically, the companies are willing to acquire partner’s managerial, marketing, and production knowledge and skills. Relational capital created between partners, and presented through the existence of trust, communication, and openness proved to have a determinant influence on the effectiveness and quality of learning process in the strategic alliances, especially in the context of the emerging markets. However, it was discovered that there is an inverted liner-curve relationship between the learning potential of an alliance and the strength of relational involvement of the alliance partners, who utilize the certain means to prevent the negative effects of over-embeddedness.
We also reviewed the operational and cultural dissimilarities among partners, and showed their impact on the relational capital and the process of learning in the alliance, determining which dimension has critical importance for the establishment of strong ties between companies.
We hope that the findings of the present study will help researchers to get a deeper understanding of the specificity of strategic alliances created in the emerging economy environment, their main motives, and operation process. Still, the results of this study suggest a need to take a broader and more comprehensive approach to the examined topic in future.
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