Strategic alliance

A Strategic Alliance is a relationship between two or more parties to pursue a set of agreed upon goals or to meet a critical business need while remaining independent organizations. This form of cooperation lies between M&A and organic growth.

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.

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’.

There are seven general areas in which profit can be made from building alliances.^[2]

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-allocates resources elsewhere.

The advantages of strategic alliance include:

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. Adequate suitability of the resources & competencies of an organization for it to survive.

There are four types of strategic alliances: joint venture, equity strategic alliance, non-equity strategic alliance, and global strategic alliances.

• Joint venture is a strategic alliance in which two or more firms create a legally independent company to share some of their resources and capabilities to develop a competitive advantage.
• Equity strategic alliance is an alliance in which two or more firms own different percentages of the company they have formed by combining some of their resources and capabilities to create a competitive advantage.
• Non-equity strategic alliance is an alliance in which two or more firms develop a contractual-relationship to share some of their unique resources and capabilities to create a competitive advantage.
• Global Strategic Alliances working partnerships between companies (often more than two) across national boundaries and increasingly across industries, sometimes formed between company and a foreign government, or among companies and governments.

External links

• Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals, Inc. Professional organization that serves those who manage strategic alliances and corporate partnerships.
• SMART- Strategic Merger & Alliance Resource Training program Metropolitan Detroit program assisting nonprofit organizations with the strategic alliance process.
• Example of Strategic Alliance program Example of strategic Alliance program with Oracle and Unisys.
• Example of coaching approach to cooperations smE-MPOWER approach for coaching the formation of strategic alliances developed within a European Union funded public project. Resulting international network of cooperation coaches as a learning community.

Footnotes