It is well acknowledged that interfirms partnerships and alliances enable new strategies that create more value for the partners. However, in the case of explorative alliances, this value goes beyond what is expectable at the time of alliance formation. Building on the Resource-Based View, we propose a model of the "potential" of a collaboration, to refer to the ability of partners to continuously design new valuable strategies from the initial resources. Based on a case study, we show that the potential has been overlooked by the literature and calls for new management and governance rules of explorative alliances. The generation of new strategies require new management rules to avoid splitting alliance's cohesion and enable efficient exploitation of this potential. Actually, this sheds light on a paradoxical binding effect between partners that participate to collective innovative design activities. Lastly, the model of "potential" contributes to the resource-based view, and outlines a future research agenda based on this potential.