A research on development of inter-organizational learning: through the case of an international strategic alliance

Abstract

This research deals with the development of inter-organizational learning (IOL) in co-operative strategies. Organizations have to adapt to their increasingly changing environment for continuing to attain profitable performance and success. Under this circumstance, co-operative strategies such as international joint ventures (JV) and strategic alliances are continuously prospering, and many researchers have addressed them (For reference, see Oliver and Evers, 1998; Faulkner and de Rond, 2000, Inkpen, 2001.). One standpoint to grasp co-operative strategies is to analyze them under the aspect of change or development. For example, Ring and Van de Ven (1984) refer the development of inter-organizational relationship (IOR) as "socially contrived mechanisms for collective action are restructured." It is essential for IORs to achieve high performance, and it is clear that the development of IORs plays important role. Here, it is also important whether knowledge or ability of each organization or IOR as a whole is improved. In other words, when the development of IORs happens as result of inter-organizational learning, the possibility of long term adaptation is considered to be increased. On the other hand, Inter-organizational learning (IOL) is one major field of IORs researches and researches on it have increased in this decade. What do we mean by IOL? How is IOL related to each organization? Does IOL itself change over time? Based on these ideas, we firstly survey existing researches on IOL in dyadic IOR and present our framework. Here, we will point out that the relationships between several types of IOL have been discussed. Although many researchers have explained that IOL contributes to the development of IOR, the fact that there is a variety of IOL itself means we should refer to the typology and the relationship between each type of IOL in thinking about the development of IOR. Secondly, with case of the alliance between Renault and Nissan, we show how IOL developed make clear this side of IORs. Lastly, we point out implications and theoretical connection between organizational learning (OL) and IOL.

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