How Alliances Build Innovation Capabilities but Narrow Their Redeployment in Amazonian Community‐Based Enterprises

ABSTRACT

Research on strategic alliances often treats supplier capability development as an outcome, but rarely asks which capabilities are built or what they can be used for. We address this through an embedded single‐case study of a lead‐firm‐orchestrated network in the Brazilian Amazon, comprising six community‐based enterprises (CBEs) supplying sociobiodiversity ingredients, drawing on 60 interviews and 43 h of observation. Sponsorship proved systematically imbalanced, concentrating in the capabilities that make these CBEs reliable suppliers and largely absent from those that would allow them to price, negotiate and sell elsewhere. In doing so, capability development converted general‐purpose biodiversity and traditional knowledge into buyer‐specific assets, narrowing redeployability in fact and in how the CBEs perceived their options. Counterintuitively, redeployment required alternative demand rather than additional capability. We name this mechanism developmental lock‐in: the progressive dedication of a supplier's resource base to a supplier through the activity that upgrades it, absent any contractual restriction. The study contributes to work on supplier development, which treats capability as the binding constraint on supplier independence, and to work on asset specificity, which treats specificity as a prior condition rather than a product of the relationship itself.