Factors for Selecting Partners in Innovation Projects – Evidences from Alliances in the Brazilian Petrochemical Leader

Due to the limitation of resources, the need to foster the developments and the lack of some competencies internally, companies are forced to cooperate with external agents, like other companies and universities, as suggested by the Open Innovation paradigm. Although there are lots of studies dealing with partner selection factors in alliances in the firm level, few studies are devoted to understand the specific demands of the task, in the project level, considered it the theoretical gap to be addressed in this study. The paper analyzes the partner selection factors in bilateral alliances projects, accordingly to the type of the partner and the type of innovation project. The data come from the case study in one Brazilian petrochemical company, analyzing in-depth 20 alliances projects with different partners – competitors, customers, suppliers, universities; and embodying different innovativeness degree incremental innovation, platforms, breakthrough and basic science. Founded on the resources based view background, it was possible to identify the more prevalent selecting factors and alliances characteristics depending on the partner type and project type. The theoretical background jointly with the qualitative evidences enabled the building of theoretical propositions to be tested in future quantitative researches.