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so this is a paper about how companies can Source Knowledge from outside the firm by sucing their employees to an
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alliance partner to work on a joint project so for example uh Nissan Rena has an exchange program for their
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employees with three other automobile manufacturers or Brazilian valet and Japanese firm mitsu have an immersion
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program for their employees and at the extreme some companies even go so far as to succ their employees to humanitarian
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sector Partners in emerging markets and their reasoning is that they'll be exposed to more challenging contexts and
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also different ways of doing things so for instance uh Global Logistics provider TNT they suced over a 10-year
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period almost 600 of their employees to work on joint projects close to 300 of them with the United Nations world food
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program in 43 Emerging Market countries now for these Alliance suun to be successful it actually requires these
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individual employees first of all to learn under very unfamiliar conditions what I call the spin out phase but then
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also to reintegrate the knowledge that they've acquired back into the company
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when they come back this is what I call the spin-in phase the problem is we don't really understand yet how these
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types of individual level processes contribute to Alliance outcomes and that's what this paper is about
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so I use archival interview and Survey data from both TNT and the world food program to try to explain first of all
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what can foster employee learning during this spin out phase but then also what might hinder reintegration during the
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spin-in phase um so what I find is first of all that in order for employees to learn from these radically different
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organizational and operational context requires very tight coordination with their Alliance Partners so they have to
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really work as a team both making decisions together and implementing them together as opposed to say working
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autonomously and then putting everything together at the end the reason for this
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is that this tight coordination can both reduce Prejudice between the partners so
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this feeling of Us Versus Them it can also help employees understand better what kinds of knowledge they can access
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through their Partners but also where it's located and finally it can also help them find creative ways of
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recombining their different approaches however this level of tight coordination that's necessary for
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learning is actually detrimental to reintegration in two different ways so it has two unintended
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consequences the first is that this type of tight coordination creates learning that is actually very difficult to
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decontextualized and then translate for your colleagues when you come back into the company so somewhat
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paradoxically the more you learn in these projects or Alliance cment the more reintegration difficulties you're
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going to tend to experience afterwards now the second unintended consequence actually reinforces this because the
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tight coordination that is required for learning is actually going to create shifts in the way that employees
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perceive what it means to be a part of the company and so when they come back their sense of what it is to be an
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employee is going to be misaligned with their colleagues and in particular for them the importance of their role as
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part of this Alliance um is going to be different than what it is for their colleagues potentially fortunately I
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find also that this effect can dampened when managers actually Foster a sense that employee suuns uh these Alliance
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Suman experiences are really valued by the company so finally I also test out the original premise of the paper that
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for firms to actually benefit from these Alliance suuns employees not only need to learn during Alliance sment they also
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need to reintegrate what they've learned when they come back what I found is
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really intriguing so uh suant managers at TNT uh I found that they actually initially evaluated the success of
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alliance M ments exclusively based on the amount of employee learning that happened in the field during projects
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but over time you could see them actually start to realize that this reintegration phase was also important
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and increasingly come Incorporated in their evaluations of Alliance cment and actually what eventually happened was
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that they even gained such a Nuance understanding of the whole process that the reintegration difficulties that they
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sometimes saw were actually factored in positively in their evaluations of Reliance thatment and so in a way they
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sort of realized that this was a bit of a no pain no gain situation and that reintegration difficulties might be
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indicative of a deeper learning experience so really over a 10-year time period we're seeing this um effective
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experience as managers really come to have a more nuanced understanding of the entire process and really understand the
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entire cycle so the phenomenon is a real life phenomenon the research was really done
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jointly with uh TNT and the United Nations world food program um with the help of the inad social Innovation
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Center so it really already is a paper that's very much grounded in the real
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world and so the findings are already pretty directly applicable but beyond Alliance cment I think we could also
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think about how the findings might apply to different kinds of contexts where employees are asked to learn their
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familiar learning working environment um especially when they're going into more
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complex turbulent or geog gically institutionally or culturally distant uh environments or when they're just
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working with partners that are very different from them and you know even without leaving the firm you could think
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about a multinational corporation where you could also see similar kinds of things playing out for example when you
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have scouting units or virtual teams or you know even in your relationships with
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your subsidiaries um and in fact we could also think about broader applications as more and more firms are
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using uh knowledge or project or team based work so you can think about the creative Industries or the Professional
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Service firms so my broader research agenda focuses on cross- sector Partnerships
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between private sector public sector and nonprofit sector organizations as a way
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to create value in Emerging Markets both for the organizations that are involved
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and for the societies that they evolve in so there's actually a follow-up project uh that I'm working on right now
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with incad colleagues Professor Luke Van renov and Julian clo where we're actually doing a study of the norstar
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alliance which is a foundation that TNT and the world food program help to create through their own partnership
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together uh it actually sets up and manages health clinics along African transport corridors to um reach mobile
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populations that are at risk of HIV and Aid so for example truck drivers or commercial sex workers and what we're
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trying to do in this study is try to understand first of all how in a multinational organ ganization that
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crosses borders such as this one how do you actually Foster internal collaboration between members of the
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organization uh in order to spread best practices about how you can establish these cross- sector Partnerships and how
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you can manage them and then we're also trying to look at then in turn how do
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these uh combinations of very diverse Partners help you reach populations that are difficult to access in these parts
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of the world [Music]