Date of Award

5-11-2025

Date Published

June 2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Management

Advisor(s)

Natarajan Balasubramanian

Abstract

Partnerships between government organizations and private sector firms combine efficiency advantages from the private sector with benefits of institutional supports and oversight from public agencies and thereby offer promising solutions to many “grand challenges” faced by contemporary society. A broad variety of such public-private partnerships (PPPs) are innovation-oriented and aim to create value through the search, creation, retention, and transfer of knowledge. Surprisingly, despite the seemingly important role of organizational learning (OL) in such partnerships, research on PPPs has largely focused on societal value creation and to a lesser extent on firm value capture but has not delved deeply into how such value considerations may influence OL, particularly OL related to private firms, in PPPs. My dissertation is motivated by this gap and starts with a conceptual framework that examines how the private firm’s value gain from its knowledge base may be influenced by risks embedded in the partnerships with the government. I specifically studied how two knowledge-related risks embedded in PPPs, namely knowledge myopia and knowledge spillovers, may reshape the private firm’s knowledge flows. The relevance of the theorization resides in the importance and uniqueness of the PPP context. Building on the conceptual framework, I proceed to explore how a private firm in the PPP would strategically respond to the governmental impacts in its own non-PPP learning behavior. The empirical results suggest that private firms may dig deeper into the PPP-relevant knowledge areas for innovation inputs and search wider in technological domains as their innovation outputs. This novel conceptualization of ambidexterity (knowledge sourcing and technology spanning) under the PPP context contributes to the learning literature by highlighting the links between organizational goals and ambidexterity dimensions. I further explore a broader theoretical extension that can be verified by appropriate empirical methods. Specifically, I investigate the scenario in which multiple private firms work together in the same PPP project. Based on interpartner learning theories and the dynamic interplay between private, common, and public benefits, I theorize that the governmental involvement in such partnerships increases the motivation and opportunity of knowledge acquisition and knowledge sharing between partner firms, thus leading to a higher level of interfirm knowledge transfer as compared to the scenario in PPPs. In sum, my dissertation primarily focuses on how private-sector firms respond—in their knowledge-related strategies—to the opportunities and challenges of governmental involvement that might alter the firms’ innovation trajectory. My work is intended to initiate an effort toward the synergy between the PPP and OL literatures. I believe such cross-field conversation can help us reveal more enlightening and undocumented wisdom for a better understanding of how to manage the grand challenges faced by our society.

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