| Cooperation is not a new subject. The alliance wave certainly touched the entire business world. Many companies have since outgrown it and many others have perished because of it. Partnerships started as the answer for many types of businesses and many types of firms. What is new is the number of alliances that have been formed in the last decade. This thesis proposes to investigate, in particular, the effects generated by alliances in Brazilian firms in terms of technological innovation. Our main research question is: How do Brazilian firms improve and build their technological capability through alliances? In order to answer this question, five cases of strategic alliance developed between Brazilian firms and foreign partners are analyzed.;According to our research, alliances improve and build technological capability. They accelerate and anticipate innovation, since personnel see technology being concretely used and both confirm its value and begin to imagine its potential. Within this context, partnerships might represent a useful strategy to many Brazilian firms for accelerating their technological development. What this dissertation makes clear, however, is that certain firm profiles are better suited than others to take advantage of such partnerships. These profiles can be classified into four types: optional alliances, unavoidable alliances, upgrading alliances, and synergy alliances.;Keywords: technological capability, absorptive capacity, learning, strategic alliances, interaction, innovation, knowledge.;In this thesis, we look at some key aspects in technology transfer via partnerships: the technological attribute with the learning potential, and the interaction throughout a cooperative strategy. We study this process as an important means of leveraging newly industrialized countries' firms' technological capability and we use as a background how alliances are structured, the main characteristics of each process and the main advantages and disadvantages for the local firms. |
