Turning experience into alliance capability: Alliance evaluation in Rolls-Royce

Abstract

Over the past years researchers have paid attention to alliance capability building as a success factor in alliance management. Research identified alli- ance tools that increase alliance success rates (Draulans, De Man, & Volberda, 2003; Dyer, Kale, & Singh, 2001; Heimeriks & Duysters, 2007) and showed the role of experience in alliance learning (Anand & Khanna, 2000). How- ever, the question as to how experience can be turned into explicit learning is largely unanswered. This chapter connects the “experience” literature with the “tools” literature by researching how alliance tools can help to turn expe- rience into explicit learning and thus contribute to the building up of an alli- ance capability. Specifically, we highlight the role of alliance evaluation techniques that are common in practice. A detailed case study into the way Rolls-Royce learned from an evaluation tool will show also that alliance eval- uation clearly helps companies to accumulate lessons learned and to capture them. It has some impact on integrating those lessons in alliance policies, but a limited impact on the diffusion of alliance learning. An additional finding from the case is that there may be a number of barriers to alliance capability building, which have not yet been studied in extant literature.