Background Strategic alliances grant access to rare know-how, inimitable resources and valuable capabilities otherwise out of reach for a single firm. Existing alliance management literature focuses on the transfer of technical know-how between alliance partners. The intra-organizational learning process with the aim to build a firm-level alliance management capability to become better at managing strategic alliances has received little attention. Especially striking is the lack of extensive research on the barriers to this process. Aim This paper aims to shed light on the existence of learning barriers to the building of a firm-level alliance management capability. Methodology A qualitative study was conducted using semi-structured interviews. Ten individuals with varying degrees of experience in managing strategic alliances were interviewed. The ten respective sample firms were spread across seven different countries and six different industries. Findings The analysis revealed 38 learning barriers existent to the building of a firmlevel alliance management capability both confirming common organizational learning barriers and revealing context-specific learning barriers. They originate either in the firm member’s thinking and behavior, the firm’s processes and structures or in the specific learning environment. Categorized in thematical clusters, they show problem areas such as a lack of top management support. Some of the found learning barriers like the tendency of alliance managers to prioritize the relationship to the alliance partner are findings that have not received attention in theory yet. Those contributions can support a deeper understanding of what individual firms and the field of alliance management is missing in building a firm-level alliance management capability.

Notre projet de recherche vise à comprendre comment les organisations peuvent s’adapter à leur environnement et le faire évoluer en tirant partie de la richesse d’informations auxquelles le marketing a accès. Pour cela, nous avons mobilisé un cadre d’analyse croisant la littérature sur l’agilité en marketing, sur les capacités dynamiques et les compétences, et sur l’apprentissage organisationnel. Grâce à une démarche abductive, qui se compose de trois études qualitatives, nous répondons à la problématique : Quelles sont les ressources, capacités et compétences qui influencent la compétence d’agilité pour le marketing ? Nos résultats mettent en évidence l’importance de facilitateurs de l’agilité en termes de structure, de culture et de technologie. Ils montrent par ailleurs que l’objectif du transfert d’informations entre les chargés d’études et le marketing opérationnel, ainsi que le degré de contrôle sur l’interprétation des informations par le marketing opérationnel influence la coordination des activités qui composent l’agilité. / The aim of this project is to understand how organizations are able to adapt to their environment and to make it evolve in making use of the wealth of market information. For that purpose, we used an analytical framework based on the literature on customer agility, on dynamic capabilities and core competencies, and on organizational learning.An abductive approach based on three qualitative studies helped us answer the following research problem: What resources, capabilities and competencies influence customer agility?Our results show that micro-foundations of customer agility, in terms of structure, culture and technologies, are needed.We also show the importance of the objective of the intra-organizational transfer between market analysts and product managers and of the level of control over the receiver on the coordination of the two activities of customer agility.