Prashant Kale

Learning and protection of proprietary assets in strategic alliances: building relational capital

One of the main reasons that firms participate in alliances is to learn know-how and capabilities from their alliance partners. At the same time firms want to protect themselves from the opportunistic behavior of their partner to retain their own core proprietary assets. Most research has generally viewed the achievement of these objectives as mutually exclusive. In contrast, we provide empirical evidence using large-sample survey data to show that when firms build relational capital in conjunction with an integrative approach to managing conflict, they are able to achieve both objectives simultaneously. Relational capital based on mutual trust and interaction at the individual level between alliance partners creates a basis for learning and know-how transfer across the exchange interface. At the same time, it curbs opportunistic behavior of alliance partners, thus preventing the leakage of critical know-how between them. Copyright

Value creation and success in strategic alliances:: alliancing skills and the role of alliance structure and systems

The authors use evidence from more than 200 organizations to demonstrate how companies which invest in alliance structures to co-ordinate alliance activity and systems to capture, codify, communicate and coach alliance-related know-how, definitely reap benefit in a number of ways. They also provide guidance on alternative ways to organize alliance structure and learning and co-ordination systems. The path to these benefits is not easy and companies need resources, people, and caution in managing the dedicated alliance function.

Choosing Equity Stakes in Technology Sourcing Relationships: An Integrative Framework

What factors should managers keep in mind when deciding on the level of equity ownership in a technology providing partner? Presents a framework based on existing research to answer this question, and also evaluates how a sample of senior managers actually decide equity ownership structures.

Determinants of Price in Custom Software: A Hedonic Analysis of Offshore Development Projects

The starting point for this paper is the general paucity of research on the demand-side of custom software development. As an initial step, we derive and estimate a Hedonic Pricing model using a sample of 160 projects executed by a large software solutions vendor based in India. Our results indicate that there are powerful economic incentives spurring the increasing trend toward offshoring of custom software projects. We estimate that the average annual decline in quality adjusted price amounted to about 14 percent. Second, we also estimate the contribution of quality and human capital to price premia in software projects which helps us pinpoint the targets of vendor effort allocation that will help boost client value functions. This leads us to speculate that the efficiency of custom software development can perhaps be improved by the allocation (or reallocation) of vendor resources designed to increase quality and delivery performance. We discuss the implications of our results for the research and practice of software development.

The Impact of Socialist Imprinting and Search for Knowledge on Resource Change: An Empirical Study of Firms in Lithuania

In this paper we examine how firms change their resources in response to exogenous shocks in their business environment. Building on core ideas from the literatures on organizational imprinting and firm resources, we suggest that founding conditions differentially imprint firm resources. These initial imprinting differentials in turn influence the search for knowledge required to adapt or change firm resources in the face of external change in their business environment. We also suggest that the level of imprinting and the location of search independently and jointly influence the success with which firms are able to change their resources. We use survey-based data from a set of firms in Central Europe that experienced an exogenous shock in 1989-1991 to test our arguments. We develop a measure of pre-shock imprinting (called socialist imprinting) on resources and use it to predict where firms will search for knowledge to undertake change in the post-shock period and how successful that change will be. We find that the level of socialist imprinting influences the search location for knowledge to change key resources and activities following the shock. In terms of the success of change undertaken, we see that distant search for knowledge is positively linked to it. We also observe that the level of imprinting and search location jointly impact the success of change; for resources with higher socialist imprinting, distant search was more effective than local search. This research makes three important contributions in the context of existing research on organizational imprinting and firm level change. One, it focuses on firm-level resources to examine the impact of imprinting. Two, we examine how differences in resource level imprinting influence the search for new knowledge required to transform these resources. Three, we demonstrate that the interaction between the level of imprinting and the nature of search has important influences on firm performance. Our findings also provide insights to practitioners and policy makers who deal with firms in transitional economies. Practitioners can better understand how to undertake firm level change more effectively in the context of sudden exogenous shock. For policy makers, both of domestic and international institutions, understanding the change process can help formulate assistance programs more effectively.