Alliance formation issues for knowledge-based enterprises

Inter-firm collaboration among knowledge-intensive firms is increasing as a result of accelerating competition, falling regulatory barriers and rising customer expectations. Resource dependency theory is used to position knowledge as the key resource for the knowledge-based enterprise and to examine the suitability of alliances as a mode of knowledge acquisition and exchange, contrasted particularly with merger and acquisition. The alliance and knowledge literatures are reviewed, and particular attention is paid to the critical alliance formation stage. This stage is reviewed against a research model that posits firm performance in knowledge creation arises from a number of factors, including the motivation for an alliance, partner firm characteristics (the ability to develop and sustain valuable resources; absorptive capacity; combinative capability; experience with alliances; and appropriate design for knowledge exchange), the development of operating structures and norms, and the choice of alliance structure. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research..     

Strategic Alliance Temporalities and Partner Opportunism*

The troubling potential for opportunistic behaviour in strategic alliances is acknowledged in both research and practice, and yet the antecedents of such opportunism remain largely unexplored in the literature. In this article we suggest that the inherent temporalities of alliances play significant roles in partner opportunism. We propose a model of potential partner opportunism that assigns antecedent and contingent roles to the temporal horizons of alliances and the temporal orientations of the member firms. We introduce the notion of alliance horizons and suggest that they are constituted by the temporal orientations of the member firms and a number of common alliance formation factors. We also discuss how these alliance horizons in conjunction with the temporal orientations of member firms result in different levels of potential opportunism. Lastly, we develop a number of propositions to facilitate empirical research on the temporal contingencies of partner opportunism and indicate directions for further studies.     

The Impacts of Alliance Purpose and Partner Similarity on Alliance Governance

It is generally recognized that the governance structure of an alliance has an impact on its probability of success. In this study, we examine the choice between two alternative alliance governance structures: equity and non-equity. Drawing from transaction cost economics, two sets of factors, namely alliance purpose (R&D or marketing) and cultural distance between partners, are hypothesized to influence the above choice. We further hypothesize that collaborative R&D alliances, where both parties contribute technical knowledge, are more likely to lead to the formation of equity alliances than non-collaborative research agreements, where only one partner may be doing the research work. Based on a sample of 2407 alliances formed in the global biotechnology industry, we find partial support for the hypothesized relationships. Specifically, we find that collaborative R&D alliances are more likely to be equity alliances, whereas non-collaborative R&D alliances do not have any impact on the choice of the governance form. We also find that alliances formed with a marketing purpose are less likely to be equity alliances. We did not find any relationship between cultural distance and the choice of equity alliances.     

International alliance formation and stock market responses:: Industry globalization as an environmental contingency

This study examines the effects of the degree of industry globalization on international alliance formation in terms of the type of alliance chosen by partner firms and stock market responses to the chosen type of alliance. Using a sample of 244 international alliances formed between U.S. and non-U.S. firms for the 1992–97 period, we find that nonjoint venture (joint venture) alliances take place relatively more frequently in global (multidomestic) industries than in multidomestic (global) industries. We also find that in global industries, abnormal returns to nonjoint venture partners are relatively greater than those to joint venture partners, whereas in multidomestic industries, abnormal returns to nonjoint venture partners are relatively smaller, though insignificant, than those to joint venture partners. Our findings suggest that the degree of industry globalization plays an important role in explaining which type of international alliance is likely to be chosen by partner firms when entering an alliance and how stock markets tend to respond to the chosen type of alliance.     

Alliance governance choices: Disentangling the effects of uncertainty and alliance experience

This article analyses the interaction between alliance experience and behavioural uncertainty to improve our understanding of alliance governance. We investigate the extent to which the effect of alliance experience on governance choices is explained by a reduction in “mundane” transaction costs or by a reduction in “opportunistic” transaction costs. Based on more than 12,000 firm experiences with equity and non-equity alliances, we demonstrate a reduction in mundane transaction costs over time by firms reusing the same governance structure in successive alliances. We also find that in high behavioural uncertainty alliances, firms rely on their experience as a substitute for equity governance to reduce opportunistic transaction costs.     

The Impact of Alliance Management Capabilities on Alliance Attributes and Performance: A Literature Review

The literature on alliances has identified a variety of inter‐firm antecedents of performance, including information and knowledge sharing between partners, shared partner understanding, and a focus on collective objectives. Recent studies have focused on alliance management capabilities (AMC) – firms' abilities to capture, share, store and apply alliance management knowledge – as an important antecedent of performance. This paper reviews 90 studies on AMC and makes two important contributions to the literature. First, the review provides an overview of and classification scheme for the different types of AMC to better organise the diverse empirical findings that have been presented in the literature. The novel classification distinguishes between general and partner‐specific AMC and between AMC stored within the firm and within the alliance. Second, consistent with the dynamic capabilities perspective, this paper offers a more detailed understanding of why AMC improve performance, by highlighting the intermediate impact of AMC on alliance attributes. In particular, the review demonstrates how the different categories of AMC influence alliances in terms of information and knowledge‐sharing between partners, shared partner understanding and the pursuit of collective goals. The review also demonstrates that these attributes improve performance. The authors note promising avenues for future empirical research that involve combining the classification scheme with research on the impact of AMC on alliance attributes and performance.     

An empirical study of the impact of firm resources on alliance governance structures

Alliances between smaller biotechnology firms and larger pharmaceutical firms are the backbone of new product development strategies within the pharmaceutical industry. While pharmaceutical firms seek access to new technologies and products, small biotechnology firms depend on these alliance relationships to access key resources such as financing and downstream capabilities because they typically do not have the resources needed in-house to successfully commercialize their products. In this study, we investigate the governance structure of these alliance relationships arguing that the more resource rich a biotechnology firm is, in terms of technical, commercial, and social capital, the less likely it is to give up equity to an alliance partner. Results suggest that greater biotech patent quality, cash position, and alliance credibility impact the type of governance structure that is chosen by the alliance partners and therefore the extent of control that the biotechnology firm is willing to give up in the relationship.     

Casting a Wide Net for Innovation: Mediating Effect of R&D Human and Social Capital to Unlock the Value from Alliance Portfolio Diversity

This paper examines the performance effects associated with different alliance portfolio configurations in terms of geographical location and partner type. Based on these distinctions, the authors hypothesize that more diverse alliance portfolios enable firms to gain and exploit innovation opportunities. Additionally, the mediating effects of R&D human and social capital on the R&D alliance portfolio diversity–innovation performance relationship are explored. The authors reason that the absorptive capacity of R&D intellectual capital determines a firm's potential gains from highly diverse alliance portfolios. From panel data of manufacturing firms in Spain for the period 2008–2013, the results confirm the inverted U‐shaped relationship between alliance portfolio diversity and firm innovation performance, implying that both insufficient and excessive alliance portfolio diversity may be detrimental to firm innovativeness. Additionally, R&D human and social capital partially mediates the R&D alliance diversity–innovation performance relationship, emphasizing the importance of internal capabilities to leverage the benefits of highly diverse alliance portfolios. These findings add a dynamic dimension to the conceptualization of alliance portfolios and how firms create value by balancing explorative and exploitative alliances.     

The Alliance formation process

While interest in developing strategic alliances within the food system continues to increase, there remains considerable risk when firms adopt such a cooperative strategy. The risk is due in part to the lack of concrete guidelines that illustrate the steps or stages of alliance development and the important strategic and operational decisions required at each stage. The existence of such guidelines would facilitate alliance formation and enable managers and researchers to better understand alliance practice. This paper provides an alliance formation model that incorporates the process of alliance formation with the strategic and operational considerations required for long term success. The model can be used by managers and academicians to develop and understand alliances.     

Embedded Networks and Suboptimal Resource Matching in Alliance Formations

Interest has been growing in alliance networks, and research has demonstrated several advantages of embedded networks, including joint problem solving. How embedded networks function as social capital and promote alliance formation has also been explored. However, less is known about constraints that they impose on firms’ extensive search for partners. In this study, we advance our understanding of the downsides of embedded networks by proposing that embedded networks facilitate alliance formations, but they may also cause suboptimal resource matching in alliance formations. Specifically, we predict that, in alliances where initial resource matching is more important than ex post collaborative activities, suboptimal resource matching is more likely when firms ally with partners with which they have pre‐existing direct or indirect ties and that such alliances decrease firm‐level resource utilization performance in operations. Using codeshare alliance data from the global airline industry, we find support for our predictions.     

Coping with Diversity in Alliances for Innovation: The Role of Relational Social Capital and Knowledge Codifiability

Alliances are increasingly considered a key element for innovation, especially in knowledge‐intensive firms. While this is true, the mere membership to alliances does not explain innovation performance, and thus the alliance's characteristics that determine high performance must be examined. This research address the question of how the diversity of partners in a certain alliance for innovation affects innovation performance, and how this influence can be moderated by certain characteristics, such as the relational dimension of social capital and the type of knowledge shared among partners. The empirical analysis of a sample of 90 biotech companies shows that there is an inverted U‐shaped relationship between alliance partner diversity and innovation performance and confirms the positive moderating effects of relational social capital and knowledge codifiability. These findings contribute to the current research on alliances for innovation by providing empirical evidence on why some alliances perform better than others. Also, the results suggest that the study of alliance partner diversity, as a determinant of alliance performance, should not be addressed in isolation.     

Costs of partner search and selection in strategic alliances

This study examines the costs associated with alliance partner search and selection as well as their antecedents. Based on transaction cost economics and the network perspective on inter-organizational relationships, the findings drawing on survey-based data from a sample of 83 firms in the German telecommunications industry reveal that partner search and selection costs are closely connected but differentially affected by task- and company-related factors. When firms must make alliance-specific investments, search and selection costs increase. A firm’s number of current alliances decreases search and selection costs, whereas neither alliance scope nor firm performance significantly affect them. Additional analyses show that alliance-specific investments especially increase search costs but do not affect selection costs, whereas a firm’s performance decreases search costs but does not reduce selection costs.     

The Alliance Experience Transfer Effect: The Case of Industry Convergence in the Telecommunications Equipment Industry

A central premise of the industry change literature is that firms change their strategic actions when an industry changes. Industry convergence (IC), the blending of boundaries between industries creating competition among firms that previously did not compete, is increasingly impacting many industries and is a salient case of industry change. Acquisitions are an important action shaping the course of IC because they trigger imitation and bandwagon effects further accelerating IC. This paper focuses on why and when learning from alliances reduces uncertainty resulting in acquisitions during IC: an ‘alliance experience transfer effect’. We demonstrate the utility of this mechanism for the substitution‐based form of IC that occurred between the telecommunications equipment and computer networking industries. Our key insight is that when the extent of IC is low there are significant transfer effects but, as the extent of IC increases, firms have access to an expanding volume and diversity of information sources that reduce uncertainty, thus weakening the transfer effect mechanism. We contribute to the alliance–acquisition relationship and learning literatures by demonstrating that the alliance experience transfer effect mechanism explains changes in firm strategic action (alliancing and acquiring) as the extent of IC changes. We also introduce a semi‐convergence perspective by directly measuring the extent of IC.     

新创企业品牌联合伙伴选择的计算实验研究

品牌联合是新创企业克服其成长劣势的有效策略之一。为提高新创企业选择品牌联合伙伴的成功率，基于复杂适应系统理论构建了新创企业品牌联合企业主体行为活动的基本模型和主体之间、主体与环境之间的交互模型；研究了外部竞争环境、合伙企业的企业类型、品牌资产、关系承诺和联合匹配性等特征对联合形成的影响。结果表明：在外部环境动态变化时，越来越多的新创企业会选择品牌联合策略，而其选择成熟企业还是新创企业作为联合伙伴，并不受外部环境变化的影响。在品牌联合系统中，作为核心的新创企业选择合伙企业时，其自身特征并不影响其是否采取联合策略；不管核心企业自身特征如何，均优先选择成熟企业作为联合伙伴；同时，合伙企业的关系承诺对联合伙伴选择的影响最显著，品牌资产次之，而联合匹配性影响不显著。候选企业在回应核心企业的联合请求时，其接受/拒绝联合的决策主要取决于核心企业对其评价的结果，其次是核心企业的品牌资产。研究结果对新创企业的管理实践具有重要的参考价值。     

Is experience valuable in international strategic alliances?

This study investigates whether firms benefit from prior alliance experiences as they undertake international strategic alliances. Different from previous studies that mostly focus on equity joint ventures, this study investigates non-equity alliances. This specific investigation is essential, because the complexity and uncertainty associated with such alliances potentially magnify the benefits of experiential learning. With a sample of 629 international, non-equity alliances formed by US firms, our results confirm the contribution of ISA experience in general, as well as that of experience specific to partner's country of origin and alliance activity type. The results also reveal a contingent benefit of ISA experiences, where experience of technological cooperation and experience with alliance partners from emerging countries both add more to firm value. We derive consistent evidence, as performance is assessed either by the market's perception of ISA value creation, or by the post announcement operating earnings in practice.     

Complementarity and Leverage as Drivers of the Stock Market Reaction to Global Alliance Formation

Companies are increasingly using global alliances to accelerate their international expansion. This paper identifies the critical factors that influence how the stock market will react to news of this type of alliance. We argue that abnormal returns on such news depend on the degree to which partners fill gaps in their international networks. We also argue that these alliances should be designed to take advantage of these complementarities in a well-defined geographical area. An empirical analysis of the stock market reaction to 72 global alliances by listed Spanish companies confirmed the importance of complementarity and leverage in explaining abnormal returns, and the irrelevance of the region of origin of the partner.     

Strategic Alliance Outcomes: a Transaction‐Cost Economics Perspective

Empirical research on strategic alliances has been limited because previous studies examined alliance outcomes, and the factors associated with them, from a single partner in a manufacturing alliance. Furthermore, many of these studies have been done from a transaction cost perspective and researchers have inferred opportunistic behavior, rather than directly measuring it and observing its actual relationship with alliance performance. Building on previous transaction cost theory and research, this study seeks to address these gaps by analyzing factors associated with both opportunistic behavior and alliance performance within a major service sector, namely the US healthcare industry. After controlling for asset specificity and alliance age, we found that partner trustworthiness and contractual safeguards were negatively related to opportunistic behavior. Furthermore, opportunistic behavior was negatively related to alliance performance, as hypothesized. Interestingly, mutual equity investments were found to be unrelated to opportunistic behavior, counter to transaction‐cost logic. These findings refine and extend the transaction‐cost economics perspective regarding our understanding of strategic alliance behavior and outcomes, and offer executives in service‐based industries some practical ideas for assuring favorable strategic alliance outcomes.     

The impact of different fit dimensions on spillover effects in brand alliances

Brand alliances represent a popular business strategy in many industries, because firms hope to evoke positive consumer evaluations of both the alliance’s product and the partner brands. However, extant research offers mixed findings regarding the effects of a brand alliance on its partner brands (i.e., spillover effects). In response, this study separates spillover effects into the effects of the alliance product on the partner brands (brand alliance effects) and the effects between partner brands (brand contrast effects), while also noting the potential moderating impact of perceived attitude- and product-based fit between partner brands on resulting spillover effects. Two experimental studies consistently reveal the existence of brand contrast effects; furthermore, the partner brand’s attitude-based fit reduces undesired brand contrast effects and positively moderates spillover effects in brand alliances, whereas product-based fit does not. Therefore, a third study identifies relevant drivers of partner brand’s attitude-based fit for different brand alliances (i.e., co-branding, ingredient branding, and joint advertising). The findings have notable implications for the design and management of brand alliances.     

联盟管理实践获取与联盟成功：被调节的中介效应

近年来,企业间战略联盟在全世界范围内越来越普遍。联盟的高失败率使企业界和理论界人士开始关注如何实现联盟成功。在长期的联盟活动中,联盟企业都积累了各自独特的一整套被称为联盟管理实践的方法、流程和技能,以提高联盟管理能力、实现联盟预期目标。依据组织学习和关系理论,联盟企业能够从合作伙伴那里获取有价值的联盟管理实践并将其应用于自身的联盟管理活动,这一过程必然有益于联盟管理。然而,鲜有研究探讨联盟管理实践获取行为对联盟成功的影响。 基于以上考虑,引入联盟管理能力和共同行动两个概念,分别作为中介变量和调节变量,构建一个被调节的中介效应模型,以更好地揭示联盟管理实践获取对联盟成功的作用机理。为了检验上述被调节的中介效应模型及相关的作用机理,利用从中国大陆收集的调研数据进行实证研究。最终的样本包含205家联盟企业,且每家企业有两位关键信息提供者,综合采用逐步线性回归和被调节的路径分析方法验证假设。 研究结果表明,联盟管理实践获取通过联盟管理能力这一中介机制最终促进联盟成功,共同行动正向调节联盟管理能力与联盟成功的关系,存在假设中的被调节的中介效应。也就是说,联盟管理实践获取对联盟成功的影响需要通过提升联盟管理能力来实现;同时,联盟双方共同行动水平越高,这一过程越容易实现。 联盟管理实践获取为解释联盟成功的作用机理提供了一个新的视角,拓展了联盟管理能力方面的研究,尤其表现为同时关注联盟管理能力的前因和结果,将组织学习理论和关系理论统一整合到联盟成功研究的框架下,这可视为两大理论的创新性应用。此外,研究结果为现实中联盟企业实现联盟成功指出一条新路,即从合作伙伴处获取有价值的联盟管理实践以促进联盟成功。     

Centrality Asymmetry and Partner Complementarity as Influences on Alliance Dissolution

Research on interfirm alliances indicates that partner firms’ asymmetry in network centrality increases the likelihood of alliance dissolution because it gives rise to a power imbalance and opportunism in the partnership. We contend that this view of centrality asymmetry does not consider the binding force that network resource complementarity can provide in an alliance, which motivates partners to ally for the long term. We propose that centrality asymmetry can have both divisive and cohesive forces in an alliance, which – when considered together – lead to a prediction that centrality asymmetry has a U‐shaped relationship with alliance dissolution. Moderate levels of asymmetry lead to lower rates of dissolution than high and low levels of asymmetry. The degree of cooperation between partners and the degree of external competition reduce the effects of centrality asymmetry on alliance dissolution because they mitigate power imbalances while encouraging partners to strengthen the alliance to withstand competitive challenges.