Paper Title
How Transparent You Want to be?

Abstract
This paper explores the issue of knowledge protection in international strategic alliances. I argue that a firm’s transparency level towards its partner represents its degree of protectiveness and reflects the trade-off between the need for knowledge sharing and the need for knowledge protection. A firm’s transparency level can have both passive and active mechanisms. The passive ones include environmental, organizational, and relational factors surrounding an alliance, and form the “transparency by default”, whereas the active mechanisms include a firm’s decisions regarding governance structure, task design, site selection, and information flow management, and so on, and form the “transparency by design”. I identify the nature of major alliance activity and the overlap of market scopes of the partners as two main determinants of firms’ designed level of transparency, i.e. its degree of protectiveness of proprietary knowledge. Index Terms - Knowledge protection; strategic alliance; exploration and exploitation