臺大管理論叢 NTU Management Review VOL.29 NO.1

119 NTU Management Review Vol. 29 No. 1 Apr. 2019 finds that firms in their foreign entry for expanding the geographical markets will be more inclined to undertake the exploratory learning than the exploitative learning while these two learning strategies may be adopted simultaneously. Although firms adopting the exploitative learning strategy will be more inclined to choose the R&D collaborative partners from their internal stakeholders as the theoretic prediction, such an inclination will not be intensified as expected when the host countries are full of institutional voids. Two possible explanations may be made for the findings inconsistent to the theoretic inferences. First, firms’ existing products/services may not fulfill the local demands and their existing knowledge/technologies are not sufficient for modifying or localizing those products/services. As such, they may need to undertake the exploratory learning to some extent to acquire new knowledge/technologies that are distant from their existing ones. Second, when the host countries are full of institutional voids, the interfirm trust and the interest alignment, that are assumed to exist among the internal stakeholders as the prior research suggests, may be jeopardized or may not even necessarily exist. Firms may find it more difficult to align their interests fairly with their internal stakeholders under the institutional voids. For instance, how to fairly and legally share the property rights of the co-developed products/services and appropriate from them become difficult; that difficulty may jeopardize the interfirm trust and therefore let firms partner with their external stakeholders who are more interest-neutral. The future research can examine the influences of such location-specific requirements for the localization of products/services and fair distributions of the joint interests under the institutional voids. Furthermore, for verifying whether the institutional voids will influence the relationship between the strategic motive of foreign entry and the learning strategy, we modify our synthesis framework by adding the moderating effect of institutional voids on this relationship. The estimation results of the modified framework are summarized in Table 6. When the additional moderating effect of institutional voids are added on the relationship between the foreign entry motive and the learning strategy in our original synthesis framework, all the causal results remain the same as our previous estimations (see Pair 7, 8, 9, 10 of Table 6).