Resource Transformation Through Alliances: The Resource-Based and Relational Rents Dilemma and Implications for the Evolution of Firm Boundaries

There is an ongoing debate on how firms can simultaneously generate resource-based and relational rents, i.e., how they can benefit from increasingly specialized knowledge and resources on the one hand, while also fulfilling relation-specific demands for adaptation that allow them to benefit more fully from their partnerships. We contend that firms with the capability to more effectively and efficiently (a) adapt their own resources to...