The literature on strategic alliances is vast. Most authors are pro-alliances and the casual reader may thereby be lulled into a false sense of security concerning the advantages of strategic alliances. There are several possible advantages of strategic alliances however by joining an alliance several opportunities are also forsaken. The opposite strategic option, a "go it alone strategy" gener...

The resource-based view of the firm has not been systematically applied to strategic alliances. By examining the role of firm resources in strategic alliances, we attempt, in this paper, to put forward a general resource-based theory of strategic alliances, synthesizing the various findings in the literature on alliances from a resource-based view. The proposed theory covers four major aspects ...

Alliance raises many knowledge transfer and interfirm learning issues that have implications for how the alliance partners manage their cooperative learning activities in the alliance system. Many of these implications are grounded in the assumption that partners in the alliances have routines for transferring knowledge, learning, gaining management efficiencies. Thus organisations can support ...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the strategic alliances that Catalan hospitals form with other health care entities and other types of institutions to foster technological and organizational innovation. METHODS Qualitative case studies were conducted at a sample of 16 public hospitals in Catalonia, Spain. The sample was limited to three (Level 1-3) of Catalonia's four levels of hospitals (classified acc...

n research and development (R&D) alliances, the partner firms must balance the tension between knowledge sharing and knowledge leakages because knowledge sharing, designed to support the alliance's technology development goals, can often lead to unintended and potentially damaging knowledge leakages. Governance structure is a well-understood knowledge protection strategy designed to reduce know...

A strategic alliance is a hybrid organizational form that is between an arms length contract and a full-fledged merger between firms. In some alliances firms take a minority equity stake in the partner firm. We refer to these as equity alliances. Using data on 759 alliances, we examine the motivation for the use of equity in alliances. We study whether equity is intended to strengthen the contr...