Organization design for knowledge transfer in alliances

Abstract

With increasing globalization, competitive landscape has undergone tremendous change. To cope up with turbulent environmental demands, firms are entering into alliances to bridge capability gap. However, movement from skill substitution to capability development requires firms to adopt organizational learning approach and to do so require organization reconfiguration. So far, literature has paid little attention to organizational redesign in response to the requirement of learning and developing capabilities. In a Joint venture, three actors are involved; Parent firm with capability, joint venture and parent firm seeking capability. This paper looks at issue of organizational learning and redesign from the perspective of parent firm seeking capabilities. An integrated framework is developed with addresses issue of identification of learning level and maps it with level of interface, control, and process orientation. Based on this framework, appropriate organizational design criteria to accomplish specific learning task processes can be formed for effective and targeted yet stable learning depending on the context.