Industrial self-organization in early technology emergence : evidence from Bluetooth application development

The resource-based view (RBV) of firms has emerged to provide colour and context to previously homogeneous models of firms and industries. Recent research in this field seeks to better understand the processes of social complexity and causal ambiguity that RBV has developed to explain the elusive impacts of resource interactions within and outside the firm. This article outlines the salient literature in the fields of complexity theory and inter-organizational alliances to develop research questions relating to the motivations for and emergent patterns of these alliances within the context of the Bluetooth standard - an emerging standard for wireless communications.