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Despite increasing research on the social nature of entrepreneurial collaboration in the context of alliances, its performance implication has been under debate. The present study tests a theoretical framework to elucidate the mediated relationship between social capital (SC) and research and development (R&D) alliance performance through the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) of alliance firms.

Based on the authors’ literature review, SC is conceptualized as the sum of actual and potential assets, including structural, relational and cognitive capital, embedded within the networks of alliance partners. Alliance performance is regarded as a combination of technological performance and business performance, corresponding to the mutual and private benefits of R&D alliances, respectively. This study hypothesizes the potential impact of SC on alliance performance and the mediating role of EO in the relationship.

The results from an analysis of 218 Korean ventures that participated in R&D alliance projects as focal alliance partners show that each SC dimension drives alliance firms to enact EO, which eventually leads to increased performance in technology and business. Specifically, EO contributes to translating the implications of SC for technological performance partially and for business performance completely.

This study links fragmented theoretical perspectives in research, shedding new light on the importance of social nature in the context of R&D alliances, which conditions entrepreneurial collaboration for better alliance performance. The findings suggest that practitioners should adopt an ambidextrous approach to the SC–EO interface at the alliance level, which opens a gateway to achieve greater performance by alliance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the curvilinear relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and innovation performance in ventures of Korea, where this topic has been unexplored.

This study used 1,837 ventures’ responses in a panel data of the 2015 Korea’s Venture Business Investigation Survey. The measurements of EO based on the Miller/Covin and Slevin scale were used from the survey. The author adopted and independently measured three different indicators of innovation performance: technology innovation, product innovation and sales growth.

The results of the regression analysis show the significant curvilinear relationships of EO with technology innovation and product innovation, while the relationship between EO and sales growth remains linear. The author also found that multiplicative EO construct explains the changes in R² better than the summative EO construct for the improvement of innovations in technology and product.

This paper provides empirical evidence on the EO–innovation performance relationships from Korean ventures – an underexplored area of research. It also takes into account the curvilinear relationships of summative and multiplicative EO constructs with different performance indicators. Future research can benefit from the use of the multiplicative EO estimation and multiple performance indicators to capture a clearer picture of the causal relationships.

How beneficial is interorganizational learning for research and development (R&D) consortium performance, and what factors drive the learning effectiveness? To answer these underexplored topics, this study aims to investigate the relationship between interorganizational learning and consortium performance and the moderating impact of social capital embedded in the consortia on the relationship.

Based on the literature review conducted, interorganizational learning is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct represented by exploitative and exploratory learning at the consortium level. R&D consortium performance is operationalized as a combination of technological and business performance, corresponding, respectively, to its collective outputs and individual outcomes. This study hypothesizes focusing on technological performance while analyzing business performance for the robustness check.

The hypotheses are tested in an original sample of 218 R&D consortium projects in which Korean ventures participated as focal partners. The results show that both exploitative and exploratory learnings are positively related to R&D consortium performance, and social capital accrued in the consortia leverages the advantages of exploratory learning for technological performance and exploitative learning for business performance.

This study adds new evidence to the literature, suggesting the performing-by-partnering mechanism of R&D consortia is contingent on the social capital that institutionalizes the common learning platform in which the partners interoperate. In practical respects, the combination of interorganizational learning and social capital deserves to be regarded as strategic elements for the value-cocreating consortia, requiring the true exchange of knowledge across partners.