Does the predator become the prey? Knowledge leakage and role reversal in alliances

Research on learning in alliances explains how firms simultaneously seek to absorb their partners’ knowledge while protecting their own knowledge from involuntarily leaking to their partners. We contribute to this research by studying whether a firm that managed to successfully absorb knowledge from its partner learns how to protect its own knowledge in subsequent alliances, as it reverses roles from a ‘predator’ to a ‘protector’. Our analysis of 529 alliances formed by 87 East Asian firms between 1999 and 2015 suggests that as firms become more skilled at overcoming their partners’ knowledge protection, they learn to better protect their own knowledge in subsequent alliances, but such vicarious learning increases at a diminishing rate. We further demonstrate that this learning is reinforced by the strength of the appropriability regime in the previous partner’s country relative to that in the firm’s own country and when the firm’s business similarity with its previous partner is greater than with its subsequent partner. In turn, learning is weakened by the value chain scope of the firm’s previous alliance.