Practices of Innovation in Mobile Computing Alliances

Global technology alliances (GTAs) and innovation capabilities are the two main themes in this chapter. Drawing on innovation concepts and the resource-based view, this chapter explains how firms gain access to complementary resources, dispersed in the international realm, and incorporate these within their organizations through GTAs. This emergent form of international resource-seeking and network collaboration across borders can be seen as a new phenomenon in international business (IB) (Kogut and Zander, 1992; Rugman and D’Cruz, 2000; Yamin, 2011). Innovation capabilities can be attained by combining a firm’s technology resources with those of overseas alliance partners, offering progress towards enhancement of competitive advantage. From a theoretical aspect, we combine the resource-based view with innovation concepts, and comprehensively examine the dynamics of resources and innovation at both a firm and a network level.