Christoph Lechner

The idea behind them is to link research and engineering efforts, pool investments and share marketing and advertising costs, all in hopes of creating a technology standard or platform around which huge new markets will arise for the products of the MPA's members. The alliance, which was founded in 1999 and led early on by a handful of companies including 3COM Corp., Agere Systems, a spinoff of Lucent Technologies Inc., and Cisco Systems Inc., emerged victorious after a several-year battle with three rival MPAs, all competing to create the standard technology for wireless local area networks, or WLANs.

Using a sample of 106 organizations engaged in strategic alliances, we develop and test a framework of alliance-related organizational decision-making processes and their impact on alli-ance performance. With regard to direct effects, our results show a negative impact of decision-making recursiveness and no significant relationship for openness and procedural rationality. Acknowledging the importance of the organization's micropolitical context in which these deci-sion processes are embedded, we also test the moderating influence of politicality. Our findings provide support for our hypotheses that in a context of low politicality, the decision-making characteristics of openness and procedural rationality have a positive influence, whereas recur-siveness negatively affects alliance performance. In a context of high politicality, however, openness and procedural rationality exert a negative influence, and the negative impact of recur-siveness is aggravated. We suggest that alliance-related decision making cannot be adequately understood without explicitly considering the micropolitical context in organizations.

We examined the distribution of benefits to partners in multipartner alliances by concentrating on dynamics of partner entry and involvement. Testing hypotheses in the Wi-Fi Alliance, we observed heterogeneity of benefits. In particular, the extent of organizational involvement in this alliance enhanced partners' reputation and market success with related product introductions but reduced their productivity. Participation in competing alliances enhanced productivity and market success despite potential efficiency losses. Finally, early alliance entrants gained market success, and both early and late entrants were more productive than intermediate entrants. These findings illuminate multipartner alliance complexity and disparity between common and private benefits.

Why do so many exploratory initiatives fail? This article suggests the reason may be managers' tendency to under-invest in four key learning activities - searching, processing, codifying and practicing. Based on a study of forty-one exploratory initiatives in three insurance firms, this article explains why each of these four activities is important and why, despite their benefits, managers tend to neglect them. In addition, the study identifies three features of the context surrounding an initiative that facilitate appropriate investments in learning. For managers, the article offers a description of the factors that may either impede or support effective learning in exploratory groups, and provides a fine-grained analysis of the links between learning activities and specific learning outcomes.

This article examines the process through which multilevel network structures translate into knowledge acquisition from alliance partners. The degree of knowledge transfer a multidivisional company achieves from its network of alliance partners is determined not only by the organization's external network structure, but also by the structure of relationships among its business units. By distinguishing two perspectives on the distribution of social capital's benefits - private versus collective - this article's approach reconciles the competing views on what types of network structures create social capital, that is, the brokerage and closure views of the social network literature. Private benefits of brokerage and centrality are more beneficial in interfirm networks, whereas collective benefits provided by network closure and low levels of centralization are more beneficial in intrafirm networks