The capacity to learn

A willingness to learn from joint venture and business alliance partners

One of the key motives for alliance formation is the opportunity for acquiring tacit knowledge, i.e. specific skills and competencies which are embedded in an individual and which can only be transferred by learning alongside the individual (Kogut 1988). Strategic alliances provide an optimum setting for acquiring such knowledge. To learn, however, one must want to learn (Hamel et. al. 1989), i.e. there must be a proactive and conscious effort to learn from the other partner.

Child (1998) views alliances as “learning races” and argues that the participant who appropriates the partner’s complementary knowledge most quickly will have the greatest success in the cooperation. According to Child (1998) the intent to learn is not sufficient. Learning also depends on the absorptive capacity of the firm, i.e. the learning capacity. Child maintains that the greater the firm’s learning capacity and the more transparent the partner’s complementary knowledge, the better will be its success in learning.

In order to have the capacity to learn the entrepreneur must acknowledge that the other party is superior in certain respects and that his business stands to gain by learning from his prospective partner. This requires humility and the rejection of pride, a trait which is perhaps not a natural tendency among self-made owner managers in the Western world.