Managing effective knowledge acquisition in international outsourcing alliances

We can clearly observe that knowledge acquisition (KA) through international outsourcing alliances has been playing a key role for firms to increase their technology capability. However, the acquisition of knowledge is not easy, it relates to the level of a learning firm's learning ability, the quality of partnership, cross-national communication, and knowledge ambiguity etc. In the previous studies, there are few researches focusing on the perspective of suppliers in newly industrialized economies (NIEs) to discuss KA, and the usefulness of information technology in the learning process is often overlooked. Therefore, there still exist some research gaps. Based on the suppliers' angle, this study will explore the differences between suppliers with more effective KA and suppliers with less effective KA. Depending on a sample of 204 cases of international outsourcing alliances is collected and tested, we find that learner characteristics, partnerships and use of information technology are the main factors to cause different results of suppliers' KA. Also, this study depicts the different learning patterns of tacit KA and explicit KA.