Create a culture of open and honesty from the offset where clear expectations and wants are communicated across the firms. This openness is required to facilitate a foundation for knowledge transfers to take place and links in turn to the need to stimulate a connection between strategic alliances and continuous improvement.
Facilitate conversations across firms - e.g. mixed department meetings, firm wide communications. Firm wide communications aligning to the systems way of thinking are fundamental as they support a focus on ensuring that any knowledge transfers are not contained to one part of the firm only. A systems wide approach is needed to stimulate success and commitment from all.
Trust and time must be focused upon. Whilst trust will come over time, there is a need from the outset to be honest and build upon this as the relationship develops. Time is also necessary to ensure that any changes are communicated to limit any potential resistance faced by employees.
5.5 Limitations
As a final consideration there is a need to consider the limitations of the research. One of the central limitations relates to the size of the sample used within this empirical study. Although this does not take away from the conclusions developed and the ideas behind them, it does have implications for the validity and reliability of the conclusions drawn. First, there is a need to consider the validity of the research as a result of bringing together different scale items for the questionnaire. Whilst on the one hand it can be argued that using existing scales in a different way reduces the validity of the research, on the other, attempts were made to carry out a pilot study in the form of discussions with members from the Doing Business in China group and therefore this was carried out to improve the validity of the research instrument used. However, this coupled with a sample size of 100 does result in the research not being generalizable and therefore future studies should seek to gain a sample population of 200+ to avoid implications on the statistical generalizability of the information gained. However, overall, this research has promoted a great focus on knowledge transfers and through an examination of the literature and the empirical study has provided a foundation for future work.
5.6 Future Research
In order to build on this exploratory study there is a need to establish further the ways in which some knowledge transfers work in strategic alliance settings and others don't. As a result, attention must be directed towards deeper level, exploratory research, which is able to draw out the very process by which knowledge is transferred. This research has enabled a focus on the importance of knowledge and that the general consensus is that it exists across the firms sampled who have undertaken a strategic alliance and this could be further developed through a focus on interviews in order to gain more detail and an insight into some of the content explored in this research e.g. how have they created an open culture to facilitate learning, is it possible to truly gain systems wide learning in an organisation. The context of China is also important and needs to come out more strongly in the research, time examining the nature of strategic alliances and provides how they differ from strategic alliances in other countries would be an important area of research.
References
Academy of Management (2016) Code of ethics [online]. Available from: http://ethicist.aom.org/content/AOM_Code_of_Ethics.pdf
Agrawal, A., Kapur, D., & McHale, J. (2008). How do spatial and social proximity influence knowledge flows? Evidence from patent data. Journal of urban economics, 64(2), 258-269.
Ahlstrom, D., & Ding, Z. (2014). Entrepreneurship in China: an overview. Internationa
