Abstract
Beneath other functions, alliances are understood to promote firms' innovative capacity. Nevertheless, what remains as unexplored is how specific deep-level inter-firm patterns of collaboration influence the degree to which alliance partners' products and services are novel. By drawing on the quality of the relationship and the degree of overlapping mental maps between the collaborating firms, the paper depicts a model of three major mechanisms that describe the form of learning in collaboration. By these distinct patterns: combination, diffusion, and genesis we also give insights in the tension between collaboration and competition in multi-partner product innovation alliances. The findings were derived from 25 case studies of project-based alliances between web-design agencies.