A Social Capital Perspective on Cooperative Strategy and Knowledge Management

One of the effective strategies to acquire knowledge externally is cooperating with other stakeholders, e.g. strategic alliance. Alliance creates an inter- organizational relationship which social capital, the value created by facilitating connection and communication between individuals or network, is an important perspective to explore and explain the cooperative relationships.

Social capital theory, underscoring its relational characteristics, implies that a firm should pursue strategies focusing on the development of valuable networks with external parties. A framework is proposed to discuss the relationship between social capital and knowledge management in the strategic alliance. An analysis of 74 questionnaire responses from participants in the strategic alliance of ITRI-sponsored R&D consortia finds that the setup of social capital can facilitate knowledge acquiring, creation, transfer and exploitation.