Process Learning in Alliances Developing Radical versus Incremental Innovations: Evidence from the Telecommunications Industry

This paper sets out to explore the extent to which the alliance partners' approaches to knowledge creation, as well as their ability to upgrade their collaborative R&D processes, vary by the novelty of technology developed within the partnership. The empirical data are based on a survey of 105 R&D partnerships in the global telecommunications industry. The results of this study show that the alliances developing radical innovations differ from alliances developing the incremental innovations in terms of their knowledge creation processes, partner and alliance characteristics, as well as process learning outcomes. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.