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

121 NTU Management Review Vol. 29 No. 1 Apr. 2019 local customers’ acceptances of the firms’ products/services which will be determined by the values and utilities brought to the local markets. Besides, those institutional failures may not even influence the firms’ decision for undertaking the explorative learning by which acquiring new knowledge/technologies to enhance the long-term competencies are the firms’ goals of foreign entry. On the other hand, the strategy will follow the motive closely but will be implemented by various approaches in response to different contingencies. In this study, it is clearly demonstrated that the learning strategy follows the strategic motive and is implemented by selecting suitable collaborative partners contingently. In sum, the future research can further examine if different strategies in different contexts will also follow the firms’ motives without being influenced by the external contingencies. 6. Conclusion and Limitations This study makes some contributions to the theory and practice. First, it is one of the very few research of the foreign R&D partner selection that takes strategic motive, learning strategy, institutional context, and partner selection into simultaneous consideration. Most of the extant research puts foci only on WHY and WHO in a given context of developed economies where the institutional systems are well structured and the technologies are overall advanced. This study provides a holistic view on the R&D partner selection process by integrating WHY, HOW, WHERE, and WHO altogether. Such a synthetic approach complements the extant fragmented research and makes this research stream more structured, completed, and theoretically integrated. Second, this study bridges the gap in the extant research that mainly adopts the perspectives of the firms from the developed countries. In contrast to the extant research, this study samples the firms from the emerging economies whose technologies are advanced in some fields but lag behind in others. Such heterogeneity in the technological development is more likely to derive diverse strategic motives for foreign entry, which can clearly demonstrate the effects of different strategic motives on the firms’ decisions for different learning strategies and further the influences on the firms’ foreign R&D partner selections in different institutional contexts. Practically, this research adopts the notion of stakeholders, i.e., internal stakeholders and external stakeholders, to classify the potential R&D partners into different groups for firms to review and select. The idea of “partner pool” can prevent firms from undertaking