| The implementation of the strategy of "trading domestic market for technology" has definitely bring us both a large amount of FDI and many opportunities to learn the advanced technology involved in the foreign firms, but the achievement is not as good as we expect, actually. The alliances between Chinese and foreign firms doesn't work very well, which are built on the basis of research cooperation and joint ventures. As a result, the core technology is still controlled by the foreign partner, so that the effect of spillover is not so significant. As to the reasons, the key point is that the capacities of the two parts of a alliance are so unsymmetrical that the foreign partner doesn't have an effective motivation to share their core technology with their Chinese partner. Therefore, it is so important to find the obstacles in the knowledge transfering process of the alliance, according to the particularity and the realistic operational problems of this kind of alliance between Chinese and foreign firms.The existing theoretical studies on the technology alliance mainly take it as a hypothesis that the capacities of the two parts are symmetrical, but the studies on the unsymmetrical partners are in a gap. This paper explains the asymmetry of the motivation, information and technology between the two parts of the alliance, and analyzes the knowledge transfering process of alliance and the problems in it. Furthermore, the paper structures a theoretical frame of the research on the knowledge transfering mechanisms, with the establishment of the alliance, the sharing of knowledge and the transfer of the knowledge at its core.Firstly, through analyzing the comparative advantages of Chinese and the foreign partner, this paper provides a model based on the game theory in order to get the dynamic equilibrium and its dynamic evolution track. Having supposed that the host country is a third part in the game choice, this paper compares the motivations, preconditions and possibilities which are before and after the government is involved. The result shows that the strategic conducts of public purchase, market admittance and risk reimbursement from the government can lead to the cooperation between Chinese and the foreign firms.Meanwhile, the sharing and transfer of the knowledge is a key factor which can influent the effects of the alliance's operation. According to the asymmetry between the two players, it is proposed that a "master and apprentice" model should be used to analyze the benefits from the sharing of the knowledge. The desire of the foreign partner to share their core technology is related to not only the sharing cost, the research cost and the risk aversion, but also the uncertainty of the outcome of the new technology and the absorption capacity of the Chinese partner. Based on the analysis above, this paper provides a complete mechanism of knowledge sharing, involving the protection of the intellectual property rights, the constraint of the expectative profits and the enhancement of the trust between the members in the alliance.What's more, this paper pays great attention to the knowledge transfer. In a view of SD (System Dynamics), it studies the causal relationships between the provider and the acceptor of the transfer, and builds the flow chart and the SD model for the knowledge in the unsymmetrical technology alliance. After a simulation with the software Vensim PLE, the research suggests that the speed of the provider's transfer, the capacity of the acceptor's absorption and their interaction mechanism play important role in the knowledge sharing and transfer. In the case study, this paper takes the "AP1000—the 3rd generation of nuclear power" technology alliance between ShenGu(China) and Westinghouse(USA) as a typical example, then discusses the problems in the establishment, knowledge sharing and transfer, and also provides the solutions to them. Through the case study, it's proved that the conclusions we've got in the theoretical analysis are correctly reasonable. |
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