Entrepreneurial alliance and social capital: building testable theory

Traditionally, researchers have defined entrepreneurship in terms of the entrepreneur---the individual who exploits a previously unnoticed opportunity. Entrepreneurship research thus focused on the attributes of the person and how these might be related to exploiting opportunities which others either didn't see or chose not to pursue. However, this individual level of analysis can prevent researchers from understanding entrepreneurial activity taking place at more collective levels of analysis. For example, concepts such as intrapreneurship (Burgelman, 1983) and entrepreneurial orientation (Dess, Lumpkin, & Covin, 1997) demonstrate researchers' interest in examining entrepreneurship at the organizational level of analysis. The current study extends this notion of entrepreneurship at collective levels of analysis by exploring the entrepreneurial activities of alliances between two companies. Lubatkin et al., (2001) call these types pf partnerships reciprocal learning alliances and suggest they are more entrepreneurial in nature than alliances formed to transfer already existing knowledge. Another limitation to the classic literature's focus on the individual entrepreneur is that it does not acknowledge the context within which entrepreneurship takes place (Shane, 2003; Shane & Venkataraman, 2000). Shane encourages researchers to view entrepreneurship as the nexus between the entrepreneur and the context within which opportunities are being identified and exploited. The current study explicitly acknowledges context by investigating the role social capital plays in engendering entrepreneurial activities within the studied alliances. In particular, we used the three dimensions of social capital identified by Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) -- structural, cognitive, and relational---as a broad framework to guide the research. The purpose of the research thus was to address the research question of how does social capital affect the entrepreneurial activities of reciprocal learning alliance partners.