Strategic alliance

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A Strategic Alliance is a formal relationship formed between two or more parties to pursue a set of agreed upon goals or to meet a critical business need while remaining independent organizations.

Partners may provide the strategic alliance with resources such as products, distribution channels, manufacturing capability, project funding, capital equipment, knowledge, expertise, or intellectual property. The alliance is a cooperation or collaboration which aims for a synergy where each partner hopes that the benefits from the alliance will be greater than those from individual efforts. The alliance often involves technology transfer (access to knowledge and expertise), economic specialization [1], shared expenses and shared risk.


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[edit] Types of strategic alliances

Various terms have been used to describe forms of strategic partnering. These include ‘international coalitions’ (Porter and Fuller, 1986), ‘strategic networks’ (Jarillo, 1988) and, most commonly, ‘strategic alliances’. Definitions are equally varied. An alliance may be seen as the ‘joining of forces and resources, for a specified or indefinite period, to achieve a common objective’.

According to Yoshino and Rangan[2] the Internationalisation Strategies can be categorized using the model displayed at the right side.

[edit] Stages of Alliance Formation

A typical strategic alliance formation process involves these steps:

  • Strategy Development: Strategy development involves studying the alliance’s feasibility, objectives and rationale, focusing on the major issues and challenges and development of resource strategies for production, technology, and people. It requires aligning alliance objectives with the overall corporate strategy.
  • Partner Assessment: Partner assessment involves analyzing a potential partner’s strengths and weaknesses, creating strategies for accommodating all partners’ management styles, preparing appropriate partner selection criteria, understanding a partner’s motives for joining the alliance and addressing resource capability gaps that may exist for a partner.
  • Contract Negotiation: Contract negotiations involves determining whether all parties have realistic objectives, forming high calibre negotiating teams, defining each partner’s contributions and rewards as well as protect any proprietary information, addressing termination clauses, penalties for poor performance, and highlighting the degree to which arbitration procedures are clearly stated and understood.
  • Alliance Operation: Alliance operations involves addressing senior management’s commitment, finding the calibre of resources devoted to the alliance, linking of budgets and resources with strategic priorities, measuring and rewarding alliance performance, and assessing the performance and results of the alliance.
  • Alliance Termination: Alliance termination involves winding down the alliance, for instance when its objectives have been met or cannot be met, or when a partner adjusts priorities or re-allocated resources elsewhere.

The advantages of strategic alliance includes 1) allowing each partner to concentrate on activities that best match their capabilities, 2) learning from partners & developing competences that may be more widely exploited elsewhere, 3) adequency a suitability of the resources & competencies of an organization for it to survive.

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ David C. Mowery, Joanne E. Oxley, Brian S. Silverman, Strategic Alliances and Interfirm Knowledge Transfer (1996) Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 17, Special Issue: Knowledge and the Firm (Winter, 1996), pp. 77-91
  2. ^ Yoshino and Rangan, Michael Y. and U. Srinivasa (1995). Strategic Alliances – An entrepreneurial approach to globalization, First Edition. Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data. ISBN 0-87584-584-3.