Alliance Capabilities and External Opportunity-Recognizing Integrative Capabilities: Creating Competitive Advantage in eLearning Innovation

Abstract

This research develops an external opportunity-recognizing integrative capabilities perspective to explain how firms create competitive advantage in eLearning innovation using structural equation modeling analysis. The results revealed that both alliance capabilities and external opportunityrecognizing integrative capabilities had significant positive impact on eLearning innovation. Additionally, the results showed that external opportunity-recognizing integrative capabilities had a stronger impact on eLearning innovation than learning capacities. The core contribution of this paper is to provide insights into the external resource renewal processes; it delivers a deeper understanding of how firms employ external opportunity-recognizing integrative capabilities to develop new resource positions and how they create competitive advantage in eLearning innovation on the basis of external resources.