2009

Kale and Singh

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Managing Strategic Alliances: What Do We Know Now, and Where Do We Go From Here? by Prashant Kale and Harbir Singh

Executive Overview
Alliances present a paradox for firms. On the one hand, firms engage in a large number of alliances to secure and extend their competitive advantage and growth; on the other hand, their alliances exhibit surprisingly low success rates. In this paper, we discuss how firms can address these failures by identifying some of the primary drivers of alliance success. First, we discuss how firms can achieve success with any individual alliance by considering critical factors at each phase of the alliance life cycle. Second, we show how firms can increase their overall alliance success by developing and institutionalizing firm-level capabilities to manage alliances. Third, we highlight emerging issues in the alliance context, including the need to recognize a new class of alliances between firms and not-for-profit organizations or individuals, the benefits of taking a “portfolio approach” to alliance strategy and management, and the opportunity to transfer one’s alliance capabilities to the effective management of other interfirm relationships, including acquisitions.

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The Alliance Paradox n the last two decades, alliances have become a central part of most companies’ competitive and growth strategies. Alliances help firms strengthen their competitive position by enhancing market power (Kogut, 1991), increasing efficiencies (Ahuja, 2000), accessing new or critical resources or capabilities (Rothaermel & Boeker, 2008), and entering new markets (Garcia-Canal, Duarte, Criado, & Llaneza, 2002). By the turn of this century many of the world’s largest companies had over 20% of their assets, and over 30% of their annual research expenditures, tied up in such relationships