Innovation vs Implementation Alliances:Embeddedness and Partner Choice during Economic Uncertainty

Abstract

This paper examines the different logics of strategic alliance formation in the Japanese electronics industry between 1985 and 1998. With data on 137 Japanese electronics/electrical machinery makers, we use discrete event history analysis to address a series of hypotheses drawn largely from embeddedness theory on how the firms’ horizontal and vertical keiretsu business group affiliations and prior alliance networks supported and constrained partner choice in new RD the “preburst” period) keiretsu served as infrastructure or platform for new strategic alliances that had both innovation and implementation goals. In the second half of our series (1992-98, the “postbubble” period) the keiretsu effects on innovation alliance formation were gone, but the groups’ role in nonR&D or implementation alliances, the purpose of which was often cost reduction, had expanded. Our results suggest that Japane...