| Summary: | Knowledge creation is a firm specific resource that helps the firm in creating and modifying advanced corporate routines that may provide the firm with a competitive advantage. Building on the contingent resource-based view and related theories, this study investigates how the firms' performance depends on the investments in knowledge based resources, and how the value of these resources is contingent on environmental factors. This study uses a longitudinal dataset that consists of 26.911 strategic alliances covering a period of eleven years, 5.110 unique focal firms, 80 focal firm countries, and 239 unique focal firms' three digit industry sectors. This basic dataset was adapted for the four separate studies that were conducted for this .thesis. This study makes the following five contributions. Firstly, to the resource-contingency theory by explicitly investigating the contingency factors that influence knowledge related resources. Secondly, to the debate between the resource-based view and the relational view over the resource control vs. resource access requirements, by differentiating the resource attributes which need to be controlled and which need to be accesses. In addition, the study positions this debate in the institutional context. Thirdly, the study contributes to the debate about the 'illusion of cultural distance symmetry', by revealing the importance of the point of reference in distance. This study shows that the home country institutional quality is a determining factor for the performance implications of an institutional and cultural distance. Furthermore the study contributes to the diversification literature, by delineating geographic from industry diversification and exploring its interaction in the context of learning. Finally, this study contributes to the absorptive capacity literature, by arguing that the fit between the nature of the internal knowledge development and the nature of the external knowledge network are determining factors for the performance of absorptive capacity.
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