The Innovative Performance of Alliance Block Members: Evidence from the Microelectronics Industry

The primary goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of the complex relationship between the positioning of companies in alliance networks and their innovative performance. In particular, we expect that a firm's innovative performance depends partly on its position in specific network settings (block membership or nonblock membership), with additional effects caused by the technology positioning strategies firms pursue in terms of technological specialization in alliance blocks. Alliance groups derive their competitive advantage from their superior and particular technologies, which they develop and exploit together in the alliance blocks. Incorporating this moderating effect of the degree of technological specialization in alliance blocks (exploitation or exploration) seems to give more insight in the contextual issues in this stream of literature.