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The prevalence of corporate alliances has increased significantly in the past 25 years. However, such coalitions do not always produce the required results – a problem that is exacerbated when several partners are involved in a network alliance. Part of the difficulty is that, often, firms do not recognize all of the key issues in the successful management of an alliance. This paper aims to outline a four-point model that can be used to help companies develop their employees and work more effectively within network alliances.

This paper is a conceptual paper that draws in examples from Apple and IBM as well as research from the automobile, oil and higher education industries. It then offers a practical ABCD framework to assist companies in developing their staff to work effectively within network alliances.

Many studies show that companies who habitually succeed at strategic alliances have developed superior management teams. Despite this, few companies actively encourage training or even set best practices for alliance management. Given the high cost of establishing alliances and the excessive failure rate, it would seem logical that companies would invest time in the development of skills for personnel, thereby facilitating alliance success. If organizations dedicated more time and funds to training staff in the efficient management of alliances, they would considerably increase the likelihood of their success.

This paper gives a practical framework that can be referred to when developing company employees to work more effectively within a network alliance. This framework is based on analysis from a broad range of industries.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for understanding the learning outcomes of strategic alliances.

On the basis of two dimensions of any strategic alliance – that is, similarity or dissimilarity of contribution of partners and explorative or exploitative nature of alliance – the author proposes a framework that recognizes four types of learning outcomes.

The distinction of four types of alliance enables the author to identify their distinctive characteristics and learning outcomes.

The paper increases the awareness of managers about the learning outcomes of strategic alliances, which helps managers to consider intended learning outcomes not only in planning, managing and evaluating any individual alliance but also in managing the alliance portfolio.

Like many other organizations undertaking strategic alliances, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, Inc. (BCBSF) needed to effectively monitor alliance activities, or track their return on investment in those activities.

This case shows in detail how BCBSF developed a metrics framework, a standard set of value measures, and introduced a new alliance management software platform. By setting up this process, the company's Alliance Management Group helped the organization manage the value generated through its alliance relationships.

Key lessons learned about alliance software: Start simple and be flexible. Try to capture useful data and look for simple ways to aggregate it. Ensure that metrics are used to guide positive change, not to grade performance. Emphasize benefits of the metrics program to alliance managers. Be realistic about frequency of reporting cycles. Make subjective metrics more rigorous by having multiple points of review and require data to support metric conclusions.

This is a case study produced by corporate managers of the firm. It has been peer reviewed but has not been subjected to independent audit.

Armed with the new analysis techniques and tools, alliance managers and enterprise alliance groups can gauge critical factors in the relationship that might seem too complex or subjective to measure. In the process, they can generate tremendous benefits and enhance corporate value in terms of operations, strategy and financial performance for both their companies and their partners.

By setting up an alliance monitoring system with sophisticated metrics, top management can routinely track: How alliances contribute to incremental revenues, enhanced profits, expanded customer base, and increased market penetration. How an alliance relationship is delivering not only financial, but also strategic value. Whether relationships with alliance counterparts are sound and based on a foundation of trust that will enable them to achieve their business objectives.

Eli Lilly's director of alliance management tells how the company has learned to make a success of its partnership strategy.

The author describes best practices and key principles.

The Lilly process has proven successful – of the last six products the firm has launched, four are promoted with a partner.

Lilly has developed a “three‐dimensional fit” analysis that helps the firm identify elements of strategic fit, cultural fit and operational fit between Lilly and a partner company.

Lilly describes how the elements of their alliance program increase the likelihood of success for individual partnerships and how a continuous learning process contributes to the success of future alliances.

This paper aims to focus on understanding three dimensions of international alliance formation by small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs): the role of internal actors, planning/opportunity management, and organizational learning.

The three dimensions form a proposed model of international alliance formation which is examined using semi‐structured interviews with 16 biotechnology SMEs from Montreal (Canada) and 12 from Boston (USA).

Findings deepen the understanding of the firm's internal development of international alliance strategy. Results generally support different roles of organizational actors in international alliance formation, often a combination of planning and opportunity management, and signal rather weak administrative routines to ensure organizational learning from the alliance experience. Interestingly, alliance formation strategies vary across the two cities (countries). Age of the firm, development phase, human and financial resources, and competencies may explain these differences.

Limitations include a single respondent in each firm, sample size, and single sector (biotechnology). Future longitudinal research could combine information from and about the implication of all actors and their networks during alliance formation and examine the process by alliance functions (R&D, production, marketing) and governance modes (equity, non‐equity).

Results suggest weaknesses and potential avenues to be explored by managers.

To the authors' knowledge, this is a first attempt to model the internal dimensions of alliance strategy formation for SMEs, integrating the role of actors, planning and opportunity, as well as learning. Multiple quotations provide a rich environment for understanding practice.

Faced with increasing pressure to improve responsiveness to rapidly changing market needs, firms must respond to the challenge of how to improve supply reliability and quality, while simultaneously reducing costs. This has led to an increase in outsourcing and the adoption of supplier alliances with key suppliers. While much has been written about when and how to form such alliances and the benefits of doing so, little evidence exists of how alliance adopters differ from non‐adopters in their attitudes towards managing suppliers and their efforts to manage quality in the supply process. This study presents results of a survey of supply management professionals that examines attitudes of adopters and non‐adopters of supplier alliances to supplier and quality management. Results indicate that significant differences in attitudes exist between alliance adopters and non‐adopters, and that differences have a direct and significant impact on key measures of a buying firm's business performance.

Suggests that strategic alliances have become a popular competitive weapon, yet knowledge of when effectively to use this interorganizational relationship remains scarce. Examines the use of strategic alliances in the information technology industry. Develops several propositions for the effective use of this competitive weapon, based primarily on the matching of the benefits of strategic alliances to existing and forecast situational characteristics of the information technology industry.

CEOs are increasingly turning to alliances as a way to grow their business and maximize shareholder value. They are searching for growth strategies while confronting a host of new forces that include intensified competition, rapid technology advances, upstream innovation and rising development costs. These forces tend to push corporations out of their comfort zones and contribute to disappointing success rates. Alliances are different from other structural transactions, such as a mergers or acquisitions, and need to be managed differently. To begin with, alliances are larger, messier to manage and somewhat open‐ended in terms of their duration and focus. They are an ongoing activity, often run as a distinct business operation. To obtain specific business objectives, such as getting products to market faster, these newer kinds of alliances are taking nontraditional forms. Accenture has identified five forms, including “invasive relationships” where significant amounts of technology and personnel are shared, or “multifunction” where different core functions are shared toward a common objective. We have found that companies can achieve high performance in alliances by focusing on six factors described in this article.

This study aims to determine whether inter-organisational communication, based on four communicational dimensions (willingness, behaviour, commitment and quality), influences the performance of strategic alliances.

To achieve this objective, from a relational perspective, a qualitative approach was adopted, resorting to five small and medium-sized enterprises (SME)/cases in Portugal. Interviews with the key informants of these SMEs and documentary analysis were used to collect data.

Based on the cases analysed, the results show that communication is fundamental, valued and implemented in the SMEs studied. However, this is informal communication, reflecting the cooperation established and not based on contracts. In these SMEs, communication is the basis for understanding the alliance’s objectives and their fulfilment, which creates satisfaction in the partners and the alliance’s success. Communication also allows an alliance to be maintained and develop continuously, creating bonds between the partners.

Without that communication, alliance performance will not be possible. The study is relevant as it indicates management practices in strategic alliances based on inter-organisational communication, aiming for good performance. Therefore, it contributes to advancing knowledge about strategic alliances through the innovative link with inter-organisational communication and its applicability.

This study is new and innovative because it contributes to the literature in the area of strategic management, as it presents phenomena to do with inter-organisational communication and its relation with strategic alliances in SMEs, as well as advancing knowledge about the relational perspective. In addition, the application and development of inter-organisational communication, in all its communicational dimensions, are the basis for maintaining alliances over time and their performance.

This study aims to specify whether heterogeneous reference-point-based aspirations are related to the cooperation levels of R&D alliance portfolios in a positive or negative (or nonlinear) way, and to unveil how cooperative behaviors evolve in recurrent project cooperation.

This study establishes a network containing a cooperation subnetwork and a project subnetwork based on patent data in the “deep learning” field to investigate how cooperative behaviors evolve in R&D alliance portfolios. A model of evolutionary games on complex networks is constructed to gain insight into the dynamic evolution of DMs’ strategies.

First, the heterogeneous aspirations of DMs can improve the cooperation level in R&D alliance portfolios. Second, compared to prudent DMs, aggressive DMs are more likely to choose the cooperation strategy, implying that an appropriate aspiration level nurtures cooperative R&D endeavors with partners. Third, the effects of effort complementarity, knowledge reorganization capabilities and cooperation supervision on cooperation are contingent on the distribution of DMs’ aspiration types.

Policymakers should identify aspiration types of DMs when screening partners. They can encourage partners to focus more on historical payoffs and establish relatively higher aspiration levels to improve the cooperation level. Developing highly detailed contracts becomes crucial when cooperating with firms that possess extensive knowledge reorganization capabilities.

This work contributes a theoretical framework for investigating cooperation in R&D alliance portfolios through the lens of evolutionary games on complex networks, thus revealing the effects of heterogeneous reference-point-based aspirations of DMs on R&D cooperation.