Research
RESEARCH
Two aspects of interorganizational collaboration are intriguing.
First, by joining forces. organizations can create value beyond what they could have created individually. They can share complementary resources to provide highly innovative and effective solutions to difficult problems. This holds the key, for instance, for coming up with solutions to grand challenges like climate change, pollution, antimicrobial resistance.
Second, interorganizational collaboration involves tensions in value capture. In any collaboration, the question arises which of the collaborating parties will benefit from the value created jointly. This leads to tensions among partners which may manifest themselves in unproductive behavior such as withdrawing resource commitments or appropriating partner resources. This cooperation problem sometimes leads organizations to refrain from collaboration in the first place.
I am interested in understanding how the tension between joint value creation and individual value appropriation can be solved such that organizations can collaborate effectively.
Negative Spillovers Across Partnerships for Responsible Innovation: Evidence from the 2014 Ebola Outbreak.
Journal of Management Studies, 59(1), 126-162.
Humanity faces ongoing and contemporaneous grand challenges. Occasionally, abrupt shocks escalate a grand challenge’s salience over others. Prior research has advocated forming partnerships to address grand challenges via responsible innovation. Yet, it remains unclear how temporal changes in the salience of a grand challenge impact innovation performances of partnerships. We address this research gap by bridging the literature on issue salience, responsible innovation and interorganizational relationships. We argue that shocks either aid or harm the performance of partnerships for responsible innovation depending on whether their domains are directly or indirectly affected. The Ebola outbreak in 2014 sets the empirical context to test our theory. We find that while the innovation performance of Ebola partnerships formed after the outbreak rose eleven-fold, the performance of partnerships treating Influenza fell by 84.9 per cent. Our theory and findings have immediate implications for today’s COVID-19 outbreak, cautioning against salience shifts among concurrent grand challenges.
Open Access Journal Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12607
The interplay of competitive and cooperative behavior and differential benefits in alliances.
Strategic Management Journal, 39(12), 3222-3246.
While alliances create synergy potential unavailable to individual firms, they may also lead to differential benefits to the partners. Since differential benefits may hurt a partner both within and outside the scope of the alliance, it is important to understand how they arise. A key source of differential benefits is private benefit extraction through the misappropriation of partner resources. Overall, private benefit extraction depends on the associated reduction in the common benefit potential of the alliance. The findings suggest that partners may refrain from private benefit extraction when the common benefit potential is high and when the expected common benefits are equally distributed among partners. In contrast, private benefits increase when one partner holds dominant operational control under high levels of task interdependence.
Journal link: https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2731
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