Technical standards alliance networks and firm performance: The role of knowledge absorptive capacity and environmental uncertainty – A literature review

Firms tend to promote inter-organizational collaboration in standardization through standards alliances. In standardization cooperation, technical standards alliances (TSAs) networks serve as a collection of TSAs between stakeholders organized for a common goal: the development, revision and promotion of technical standards together, which helps firms gain external knowledge and increase their influence on the standard-setting process. However, although TSAs qualify as a specific form of strategic alliances, most available studies on alliance networks focus on other strategic alliances rather than this context. In order to fill this gap, a comprehensive literature review is undertaken to integrate social network theory, organizational learning theory and the knowledge-based view in this paper. We introduce knowledge absorptive capacity and environmental uncertainty into the relationship between TSA networks and firm performance. By analyzing the relationship between these variables, we put forward four research hypotheses and construct a conceptual framework