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Much of the extant evidence in the marketing literature posits that firms use strategic alliances to share resources, costs and risks as paths to performance improvements. Drawing from the organizational ecology theory, this study aims to propose a different rationale, namely, that strategic alliances protect a firm’s core structure – its stated goals, authority structure, core technologies and marketing strategies – by mitigating the need for hazardous changes in hostile environments.

This study collected quantitative data using market survey and analyzed the data with the regression method.

Using Chinese firms in three technology industries as the research setting, this research finds a positive and significant relationship between environmental hostility and core structure dynamism. Although strategic alliances themselves have no direct bearing on core structure dynamism, they are found to moderate this relationship negatively, that is, strategic alliances attenuate the relationship between environmental hostility and structural changes.

This paper argues that strategic alliances have significant moderating effects on firm performance, that is, firms use strategic alliances to outsource competence to partners and, thus, avoid internal turmoil. However, the moderating effect alone cannot explain the complexity of strategic alliances. There could exist other effects that remain unknown. In addition, individual-level factors could have significant impacts on strategic alliance management. Future studies should look into these issues to advance the authors’ knowledge on strategic alliances.

The findings of this study show that managers should outsource competence to partners when they experience turmoil in markets. Adapting to market turmoil internally could lead to market failure.

This study provides a new rationale for strategic alliances, that is, firms use strategic alliances to reduce market uncertainty. This rationale has not been reported in the existing literature.

Trust entails the assumption of risk by the trustor to the extent that the trustee may act in a manner unaligned with the trustor's interests. Before a strategic alliance is formed, each firm formulates a subjective assessment regarding whether the other firm will behave in a trustworthy manner and not act opportunistically. To inform this partner analysis and selection process, the authors leverage the concept of value of information to quantify the benefit of information gathering activities on the trustworthiness of a potential trustee.

In this paper, the authors develop a decision model that explicitly operationalizes trust as the subjective probability that a trustee will act in a trustworthy manner. The authors integrate the concept of value of information related to information gathering activities, which would inform a trustor about a trustee's trustworthiness.

Trust inherently involves some degree of risk, and the authors find that there is practical value in carrying out information gathering activities to facilitate the partner analysis process. The authors present a list of trustworthiness indicators, along with a scoring sheet, to facilitate learning more about a potential strategic alliance partner.

The need for a quantitative model that can support risk-based strategic alliance decision-making for partner analysis represents a research gap in the literature. The modeling of strategic alliance partner analysis decisions from a value of information (VOI) perspective adds a contribution to the trust literature.

Based on theories of organizational learning and strategic considerations, this study aims to develop a strategic contingency model for technology alliance and identify how alliance‐specific factors, strategic factors, and organizational capability factors influence firms to acquire competencies and competitive advantages through technology alliance.

A six‐page, 94‐item survey questionnaire was developed and mailed to top‐level managers of the semiconductor firms in Taiwan. A total of 63 valid responses were received.

The study results indicate that firms with higher absorption orientation, higher risk reduction orientation, higher R&D scale economy orientation, and higher top management team experiences tend to perform better in acquiring competitive advantages. In addition, the strategic fit between strategic factors, organizational capability factors and technology alliance choice could lead firms to better competitive advantage.

Although the results of this study are fruitful, several suggestions could be made for academicians and business practitioners. First, the respondent rate of this study is low and could be improved. Second, in addition to the strategic contingency model as developed in this study, more research factors could be further investigated. Third, more case studies could be conducted to reconfirm the results of this study.

The major contribution of this study is to investigate what critical factors would influence the choice of a technology alliance model, and what effects the influencing factors have on the relationship between a technology alliance model and the intended competency development. The results of this study provide very important references for academicians and practitioners to investigate the effectiveness of technology alliance.

Cooperation between competing firms (or coopetition) has been under increasing research interest during the last decade. It is generally proposed that coopetition can be a beneficial strategy that can enable gaining a competitive advantage. Current contributions linking coopetition with actual firm performance, however, are few. In order to address this issue, we conduct an empirical study in the global information and communication technology sector to examine the effect of strategic alliances between key competitors on the performance of a single firm. Our results indicate that a high relative number of strategic alliances among a group of firm’s key competitors contributes negatively to firm performance. This implies that firms should be aware of the risks that are included in cooperating with too many of their most direct competitors.

Although the benefits of strategic alliances are well documented, whether strategic alliances can be a viable entry strategy option for small and medium‐size enterprises (SMEs) to successfully penetrate markets held by major incumbent suppliers is less clear. In this paper, strategic alliances are shown to be an effective entry‐cum‐deterrence strategy for SMEs to successfully penetrate markets that are well established and dominated by major corporations. In addition, the conditions under which SMEs can use strategic alliances as an entry strategy without restricting themselves to target only those markets ignored by bigger firms are identified. In terms of methodology, this paper follows a deductive approach – one based on game theory, to examine explicitly the reactions of bigger firms to the entry of SMEs into their markets, specifically taking into account the resource limitations faced by SMEs. To verify that the theoretical arguments presented are consistent with practice, two cases of the use of strategic alliances by SMEs as an entry strategy to penetrate markets dominated by major corporations are examined. The practices and experiences of these SMEs were found to be consistent with the theoretical arguments presented here.

From an absorptive capacity perspective, this study aims to analyse the influence of strategic alliances on the development of intellectual capital.

A quantitative study was chosen, with data on technology-based small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Portugal, leading to 257 valid answers.

The results obtained from a structural equation model show that learning/knowledge and efficiency as important functions underlying strategic alliances exert a strong influence on intellectual (human, structural and relational) capital.

These outcomes reveal that strategic alliances are a way for SMEs to overcome resource constraints in terms of intellectual capital, which represents an important implication for business practice. This study provides particular insights into how and to what extent alliance-specific mechanisms and functions lead to which improvement and effect.

The study underlines the importance of strategic alliances for technology-based SMEs. In this way, this study adds to the scarce in the field providing evidence for the SMEs sector. Therefore, strategic alliances and intellectual capital should be considered two key tools for this firm segment and worthy of further research in absorptive capacity.

This paper aims at reviewing the extant knowledge management (KM) research field within a strategic alliance context to understand the historical roots, its temporal progression, current state and potential future in a meaningful way.

Data for this study was retrieved from the Scopus database using a systematic literature search process. The bibliometric characteristics of 393 research documents were analyzed using bibliometric and structured network analysis.

The findings of the study suggest that the publication in the field have been growing with an average rate of 8.48%. This analysis also lists the most productive and impactful authors, main outlets, and the most impactful secondary and primary publication in the field. In addition, the conceptual and intellectual structure of the research field was constructed and discussed.

This paper uses an objective and quantitative approach by reviewing the related publications and virtually included all the relevant publications in the analysis, which was seen to be uneconomical when doing traditional literature reviews.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze three characteristics of strategic alliances in Italy to estimate their influence on financial performance. The authors test how alliance complexity, strategic planning and accounting control influence revenue growth, asset growth and EBITDA margin.

This paper uses contractual and financial data to test hypothesized relationships in structural equation modelling (SEM) using partial least squares (PLSs).

This paper highlights that the extent of strategic planning positively influences the growth in assets but not in revenue or EBITDA margin. In addition, the findings of this paper support the idea that the complexity in the alliance is significantly related to the quantity of accounting controls within alliance.

This paper improves existing research on the subject, as it contributes to open the black box of alliances’ internal operations by examining the details of 50 Italian contracts to create a multidimensional profile of each alliance.

This study delves in the controversy about the nature and the sign of the effect of strategic alliances and exploration and exploitation capabilities on innovation and new product development. The paper analyses the effects of knowledge sharing and strategic alliances relationships at the firm level. Specifically, we study the influence of strategic alliances relationships in new product development and the mediating role of exploration and exploitation as dynamic capabilities.

This investigation proposes a theoretical model tested using structural equation modeling (SEM). The multigroup analysis was performed to understand the moderating role of. A questionnaire survey was developed to explore the relations between strategic alliances and innovation and new product development variables. For this study, 387 valid questionnaires were collected from a sample of Portugal SME' firms. A 90-item questionnaire was submitted to employees managers of a large number of Portuguese SMEs, which consists to study the relationships among all the variables.

The results show that exists a positive direct influence of strategic alliances on innovation and new product development, and mediating impact the exploration and exploitation by the moderating role of knowledge sharing.

This study has some methodological limitations affecting its potential contributions. A cross-sectional study that captures one image in time and its ability to identify strict causality between variables is limited. Furthermore, the results are based on log collected from a key respondent, rather than broader actual data. The results are restricted to one country, Portugal. Future research should initially target different countries. Such research could then test the generalizability of the results.

To fill this managerial relevance gap, we propose a process model in which the main antecedents of alliance stability will be examined. We argue that an alliance's evolutionary dynamics depend on these factors and variables that the partners must assess and manage over its developmental stages. In this sense, managers have significant scope to influence the ultimate success of strategic alliances. This study highlights the need to actively manage the cooperation – competition (coopetition) tension with the alliance partner and to apply the knowledge acquired from the partner to create new knowledge to enhance innovative performance

This paper contributes to fill the gap between strategic alliances and new product development mediated by exploration and exploitation in the dynamic capabilities view.

The number of strategic alliances has almost doubled in the past ten years and is expected to increase even more in the future. More than 20,000 corporate alliances have been formed world‐wide over the past two years, and the number of alliances in the USA has grown by 25 percent each year since 1987. Outsourcing is a form of strategic alliance which is attractive for many organizations, but it is not simple or easy to create, develop, and support. There are many implementation problems and the failure rate is projected to be as high as 70 percent. In this paper a case study methodology is employed and the chosen case is outsourcing. Our case study shows that the development of a long‐term strategic outsourcing relationship requires moral, ethical standards, trust and a willingness not to try to exploit the new relationship at the expense of long‐term cooperation. The paper concludes that a strategic outsourcing relationship needs a specific management strategy and that companies should also pay more attention to the burdens embedded within it.