Abstract
While technological discontinuities often represent threats to existing firms, they also may create new opportunities to enterprising firms. In this paper, we argue that the likelihood of using alliances to access new resources following a discontinuity is shaped by the nature of a firm’s experience before the discontinuity. We test our hypotheses on a sample from the biopharmaceutical industry that experienced a technological discontinuity in the form of emergence of combinatorial chemistry. We find that dissolutions due to technical factors increase the willingness to engage in new alliances for new resources following the discontinuity to a greater degree than dissolutions attributable to relational factors. Thus, prior alliance stumbles for what could be considered more exogenous reasons differentially impacts future alliance activity over stumbles viewed as more endogenous in nature.
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