The Path of Alliance Value Creation under Dual Logic:A Qualitative Comparative Analysis
The increasingly fierce external competitive environment and the political and economic order facing profound changes have brought unprecedented challenges and opportunities to China's technological innovation and development.In reality,many univer-sities and research institutes in China have applied for patents with technological competitive advantages in a"sleeping"state,and the influence of academic and scientific research achievements on in-dustrial technological innovation and development is relatively lag-ging behind.However,enterprises with technological competitive needs and market-oriented operation capabilities are facing techni-cal problems and the dilemma of having to withdraw from related competitive fields.In this context,as an important carrier of na-tional innovation-driven strategy,industrial technology innovation strategic alliance is an important issue that must be paid attention to in China's economic and social construction,and also an important support for China's construction of technological innovation sys-tem.However,in the actual operation of industrial technology innovation strategic alliance,its operational effectiveness is restricted by many aspects,such as lack of mechanism,uneven interests and cultural differences,and even runs counter to the original intention of the al-liance.The governance of resource dependence among members in the operation of the alliance has become an important influencing factor for value creation.The original intention of members to join the alliance is to have important resources in the alliance to reduce their dependence on the external environment.The similarity and interdependence of resources are not only beneficial for members to invest their own resources for innovation,but also have poten-tial power game problems caused by common market and interest division.In fact,not all resource flows among alliance members are symmetrical or bidirectional.The increase of interdependence among alliance members indicates that the overall dependence level of the alliance has increased,but this cannot eliminate the asym-metric dependence between them.In the past,from the perspective of members in the alliance,the research often focused on how members acquire resources based on the alliance,so they paid more attention to the asymmetry of depen-dence,ignoring the influence of different aspects of dependence on the overall value creation of the alliance and the performance of ex-change partners,which meant that they focused too much on value acquisition.Recent research pointed out that more attention should be paid to the influence of joint dependence on value creation in exchange relations.However,due to the limitation of methods,ex-isting studies only discuss inter-organizational dependence from an independent perspective,or compare their different functions.Most of the conclusions are that power logic contains relationship confrontation,which is not conducive to enterprise performance,while embedded logic emphasizes the reciprocal nature of relation-ship and promotes enterprise performance,and rarely discusses the interaction between them,and it is difficult to prove how the alli-ance operates to achieve high value creation when a certain logic of dependence plays a leading role,which provides a good prospect for subsequent research.The milestone progress of resource dependence theory is to clearly define the two dimensions of"interdependence".Embedded logic and power logic coexist,and the increase of asymmetric depen-dence may be accompanied by the increase of joint dependence,and the two interact to influence the choice of inter-organizational relationship governance.The purpose of alliance governance mech-anism is to help members to better cooperate in resources and solve differences and coordination problems,so as to achieve higher alliance value creation.The existing research focuses on contract and relationship governance,and there are frequent heated debates about whether contract mechanism and relationship mechanism can replace or supplement each other in the governance literature.In addition,traditional methods implicitly equate contract governance with formal governance and regard relationship governance as in-formal governance.In recent years,some studies have paid attention to the dynamic nature of governance mechanism and pointed out that contract governance is not necessarily formal and relationship governance is not necessarily informal.Therefore,based on the re-source dependence theory,this paper constructs the influence path of alliance"resource dependence-governance mechanism-value creation",introduces the dual logic of resource dependence theory into the research of alliance value creation,analyzes alliance value creation from the perspective of configuration based on holistic view,reveals the linkage matching function of alliance members'dependence and governance mechanism,and promotes the alliance to obtain technical output and achievement transformation.Based on the theory of resource dependence,based on the classic method of dividing embedded logic and power logic,this paper con-structs a theoretical model for managing the dependency relation-ship between strategic alliances of industrial technology innovation in China and promoting the value creation of alliances through literature review and theoretical review,and makes in-depth explo-ration on the influence path of alliance value creation by using fsQ-CA.It is found that the dual logic of member dependence and the governance mechanism combine to form three paths to realize the high value creation of the alliance;Embedded logic and power logic coexist in dependence,and conflict coordination mechanism plays an important role when power logic dominates;Non-high value cre-ation of alliance is not the opposite of high value creation,and the imperfection of alliance operation mechanism is an important factor of non-high value creation.This study promotes the application of resource dependence theory in the study of alliance value creation,and provides decision support for achieving the goal of alliance high value creation through asymmetric combination ideas.Compared with the previous literature,the contributions of this paper are as follows:at the theoretical level,firstly,the research on alliance performance is expanded from the perspective of holistic view,which confirms the combination of causality and the diversity of path achievement in realizing alliance high value creation.Sec-ondly,based on the method of configuration analysis,it is pointed out that the path of alliance high and non-high value creation is asymmetric,which makes up for the fact that the previous symmet-rical method oversimplifies how different strategies interact.Third-ly,the dual logic based on resource dependence theory measures alliance dependence,and at the same time adopts cross-sectional questionnaire and longitudinal tracking score design,which opens the black box of how the member resource acquisition and operation mechanism leads to alliance value creation to some extent.On the practical level,different governance mechanisms have substitution and complementary effects under the dual logic of alliance mem-bers'dependence.This paper provides decision support for alliance managers on how to deal with alliance members'dependence in al-liance operation and achieve the goal of creating high value through asymmetric combination ideas.
Strategic Alliance of Industrial InnovationResource DependenceOperation Mechanism of AllianceValue CreationFuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis(fsQCA)
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