The coordination structure of international collaborative technology arrangements

As the pace and breadth of technological progress increases around the world, companies both large and small are forming international collaborative arrangements as the basis for developing competitive advantage from technology. Management of these arrangements requires the creation and maintenance of a wide variety of strategic and operational interdependencies within and between companies. The paper introduces a method for developing a representation leading to a system level understanding of the coordination structure of international collaborative arrangements. The method is based on recent advances in coordination theory and object oriented domain analysis. We apply the method to represent four international collaborative arrangements. The representations that result are then used as data to identify five basic modules of the coordination structure of international collaborative arrangements: strategic management, intra-firm management, joint management, technology exchange and customer interaction. The proposed method leads to increased organizational learning of the goal oriented coordination processes for which managers are responsible when establishing international collaborative technology arrangements.