The role of strategic alliances in creating technology legitimacy: a study on the emerging field of bio-plastics

The aim of this study is to analyze the role of strategic alliances in creating legitimacy for an emerging sustainable technology. The literature has identified different ways in which alliances create legitimacy for firms, but it has failed to address the legitimacy of technologies. This paper contributes to this literature by identifying technology-sourced market legitimacy, technology-sourced social legitimacy and technology legitimacy. It focuses on the case of bio-plastics, which is emerging as a sustainable technology due to pressures towards environmentalism in the chemical industry. The analysis is based on a database that we constructed using secondary sources, and which contains information on 105 alliances in the field of bio-plastics over the period 1990-2013. The results show that firms increase their market and social legitimacy by accessing the sustainable technology of an alliance partner, by collaboratively developing a sustainable technology, or by providing the technology of a partner with access to customers and production capacity. Alliances also promote the desirability and appropriateness of a technology (i.e. technology legitimacy) by supplying multiple applications of the technology to an expanding number of markets, by exercising their signaling role, and by acting as institutional entrepreneurs. Alliances that stimulate technology-sourced market and social legitimacy are often bilateral and inter-firm alliances that produce and market sustainable technologies. In contrast, alliances that stimulate technology legitimacy are multilateral and inter-organizational alliances in the pre-competitive and R&D stages of the value chain.