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Alliance Portfolios and Resource Competition: How a Firm’s Partners’ Partners Influence the Benefits of Collaboration

Working Paper
This study examines the performance implications of competition for access to the resources of a firm’s alliance partners. Partner time and attention may be non-scale free resources, with their use in particular contexts constrained when applied across multiple relationships. Consequently, the other relationships in which a firm’s alliance partners are engaged can influence the firm’s returns to its alliance collaborations. Using a panel dataset of biotechnology start-ups the author finds that greater overlap in the R&D function between a start-up’s alliances and its partners’ other relationships can reduce start-up innovation output. The author theorizes that this stems from a reduction in knowledge spillovers from the partners, and investigates the contingencies moderating this effect, as well as the conditions under which such effects may be less salient.
Faculty

Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise