Strategic alliance research emerged to explain alliance formation based upon transaction cost minimisation and opportunism reduction. Later research, and early research from Japan, emphasised the role of alliances in facilitating the transfer of knowledge between organisations. Most recently, alliance research has focussed on the development of shared, potentially idiosyncratic, resource stocks. This paper builds on this recent research, testing the proposition that alliances are important vehicles allowing firms to access or acquire external resources, hence shoring up capability gaps and building new capabilities as required during firm, product and industry life cycles. Using a sample from Australian manufacturing small-and-medium-sized enterprises, the paper reveals that alliances employed by firms can be viewed as initiatives to either fill a gap in the firm's resource stock or to exploit a perceived opportunity in its operational and strategic environment.

The confusion concerning the theoretical roots of the dynamic capabilities view and the fact that it was often being positioned as an extension to the resource-based view in strategic management, prompted a paper by Galvin, Rice, and Liao (2014) that suggested that the dynamic capabilities view would benefit from adopting a more explicit Darwinian approach. In response to this paper, Arndt and Bach (2015) highlighted that the seminal papers in the field do indeed take an evolutionary perspective and that in operationalizing the variation-selection-retention cycle in an empirical setting it is necessary to move away from firm performance as a dependent variable and instead use survival, which more closely aligns with the concept of natural selection. In this paper, we respond to this recent critique to articulate the benefits of a Darwinian nomenclature and how this will assist in positioning the dynamic capabilities view as an independent, though complementary, theory to the resource-based view. However, we do clearly recognize that until the key terms of variation, selection and retention can be operationalized at the routine, firm and industry level, such an approach may not in itself bring the field towards a common understanding of how dynamic capabilities operate in different environments.

The Darwinian logic of evolution occurring via the mechanisms of variation, selection and retention provides a possible theoretical framework from which to further develop the dynamic capabilities view. Presently, criticized for lacking a theoretical foundation and featuring a degree of confusion concerning how it aligns with the resource-based view, the dynamic capabilities view would benefit from greater clarity concerning its assumptions, theoretical base and the development of a series of testable predictions. We test elements of a potential Darwinian style framework through variation-focused hypotheses using panel data for 190 Australian service firms. Our results highlight the importance of market development as a basis for variation, however, the impact of dynamic capabilities upon a likely antecedent of selection was not clear and highlighted a nuanced relationship between capability development, market development and sales growth in an small-and-medium-sized enterprise environment. We conclude that applying a Darwinian lens to the dynamic capabilities view is challenging without longer time series data and additional measures, but such an approach remains theoretically attractive and further investigation may help clarify how we conceptualize the relationship between the dynamic capabilities view and resource based view.

This article develops and tests a model integrating dynamic organisational capabilities, market transformation arrangements and firm performance. This model addresses weaknesses in previous empirical research by integrating accumulation and path dependency in measures of dynamic capabilities. Using a sample of 444 small and medium-sized Australian manufacturing firms, the study finds that performance is driven by the successful deployment of dynamic capabilities; such performance is mediated by purposeful market transformation strategies.

The adoption of open innovation creates a dilemma for firms. On one hand, a commitment to openness facilitates the flow of knowledge between firms, with this flow (generally) unconstrained by royalties and other appropriation mechanisms. However, openness has also led to unintended knowledge spillovers, limiting firms' abilities to protect their core knowledge. This dilemma has created a need to consider the relationship between openness and firms' appropriability regimes. In order to explore this "paradox of openness," an investigation of the appropriability regimes adopted by Australian firms through an empirical analysis of innovation-related data from 4 322 businesses was undertaken. It was found that the relationship between two indicators of openness (the breadth of external knowledge sources and the scope of interorganizational collaborations) and the scope of appropriability regimes employed by a firm exhibits a nonlinear inverse-U (n) form. The results also indicated that open innovators actually increase controls on their intellectual property through informal appropriability regimes rather than loosening appropriability mechanisms to promote knowledge spillovers as open innovation theories suggest.

This fifth edition of 'Strategic Management: Thinking, Analysis, Action' reflects the combination of the major thoughts I have had about the teaching and practice of strategy and strategic management over the 25 years I have been working in this area. This is the eighth major strategy textbook I have authored over that period. It reflects the stream of thinking of all its predecessors. I have tried to capture the developments that I have seen and experienced in my thinking, research and consulting, as well as to highlight those issues that will influence strategic thinking and practice in the future.