UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Previously Published Works Title Business groups, networks, and embeddedness: innovation and implementation alliances in Japanese electronics, 1985–1998 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3dq9f64q Journal Industrial and Corporate Change, 26(3) Authors Lincoln, James R Guillot, Didier Sargent, Matthew Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Industrial and Corporate Change Advance Access published September 10, 2016 Industrial and Corporate Change, 2016, 1–22 doi: 10.1093/icc/dtw037 Original article Business groups, networks, and embeddedness: innovation and implementation alliances in Japanese electronics, 1985–1998 James R. Lincoln,1,* Didier Guillot,2 and Matthew Sargent3 1Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. e-mail:
[email protected], 2Fukui Prefectural University, Fukui 910-1195, Japan. e-mail:
[email protected] Downloaded from and 3USC Digital Humanities Program, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA. e-mail:
[email protected] *Main author for correspondence. http://icc.oxfordjournals.org/ Abstract This paper examines the changing process of strategic alliance formation in the Japanese electronics industry between 1985 and 1998. With data on 123–135 Japanese electronics/electrical machinery makers, we use a dyad panel regression methodology to address hypotheses drawn largely from em- beddedness theory on how the firms’ horizontal and vertical keiretsu business group affiliations and prior alliance networks supported and constrained partner choice in new R&D (innovation) and nonR&D (implementation) domestic economy alliances. We find that in the first half of our series (1985–1991; the “preburst” period), keiretsu served as infrastructure for new strategic alliances that by guest on September 11, 2016 had both innovation (R&D) and implementation (nonR&D) goals.