Wassmer (2010) "Alliance portfolios: A review and research agenda
26 important questions on Wassmer (2010) "Alliance portfolios: A review and research agenda
What does this article offer?
- The emergence of alliance portfolios
- The configuration of alliance portfolios
- The management of alliance portfolios
How is alliance portfolio defined in this study?
On which level is this study situated?
- Higher grades + faster learning
- Never study anything twice
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Which two theories have been integrated in a significant number of studies?
- Social network theory
- Resource-based view
What are the motivations why firms form strategic alliances?
- To access new valuable resources from partners
- To reduce transaction costs
- To learn from a partner
- To deal with uncertainty through future options for expansions
- To improve the competitive positioning vis-à-vis rivals
What is one of the main motivations for firms to build alliance portfolios?
On which two perspectives can the emergence of alliance portfolios be explained?
- On the firm level analysis
- From the level of the individual manager
How can the emergence of alliance portfolios be explained on the firm level analysis?
Firms build alliance portfolios mainly for strategic reasons to enhance their strategic competitiveness.
How can the emergence of alliance portfolios be explained on the level of the individual manager?
Which dimensions compises alliance portfolio configuration?
- The size dimension determined by characteristics such as the number of alliances and partners
- The structural dimension constituted by characteristics such as breadth, density, and the level of redundancy within the portfolio
- The relational dimension made up of characteristics such as the tie strength of individual alliances in the portfolio
- The partner dimension focusing on certain partner-related characteristics
What does the configuration of a focal firm's alliance portfolio determine?
- The quality, quantity, and diversity of information and resources to which the focal company has access
- The efficiency of the access to these network resources
- The flexibility or stability of the focal company's position in the interorganizational field
What are the six prominent research issues that have been discussed in the existing literature?
- The role of alliance portfolio size
- The role of alliance partners
- The role of structural and relational alliance portfolio characteristics
- The role of interdependencies between alliances and alliance partners
- Changes that firms make in the configuration of their alliance portfolios over time
- The role of experience accumulation, learning, and knowledge transfer within alliance portfolios
What is the role of the alliance partners?
From the perspective of young and entrepreneurial firms, the affiliation to larger already established alliance partners can provide a range of benefits, such as preferential access to valuable resources or spillover effects from the partner’s reputation. Findings, however, stay somewhat inconclusive.
What is the role of international partners in the alliance portfolio?
What are the structures and relational alliance mechanisms?
- The tie strength of individual alliances
- The structure of the network.
In which way can strong ties in the context of alliance portfolios be a double-edged sword?
- On one side, an alliance portfolio of strong dyadic ties can affect a focal firm’s innovative capabilities positively if they are trust based, knowledge intensive, and reinforced through the development of social content between alliance partners, relationship-specific investments, and the deepening of mutual knowledge.
- On the other side, they can also affect a focal firm’s innovative capabilities negatively by stimulating a vicious circle in which a reduced number of contacts, decreased flexibility for collaboration with new partners, and diminishing responsiveness to new market trends reinforce each other, leading to a small, homogeneous, and closed network.
What are the interdependencies in alliance portfolios and the portfolio effect?
Which two different types of outcomes do the interdependencies in alliance portfolio create?
- Synergies
- Conflict.
On which two different levels can synergy- or conflict creating interdependencies in alliance portfolios occur?
- Between individual alliances - more specifically between alliances of one business unit or between various alliances of different business units.
- Between a focal firm’s partners within an alliance portfolio.
When do conflicts between partners occur?
What are the changes that firms make in the configuration of their alliance portfolios over time? From two different perspectives:
- The antecedents that drive change in the configurations, including strategic uncertainty, the potential to shape the environment, and the firm’s alliance strategy.
- Changes in the alliance portfolio configurations treated as an antecedent to an outcome variable such as a firm’s competitiveness.
What is the role of experience accumulation, learning, and knowledge transfer within alliance portfolios?
What are the three factors that need to be considered to fully understand the value that is created by a new alliance?
- The amount of prior alliance experience
- The heterogeneity of that prior alliance experience
- The degree of novelty of the new alliance that is added to the alliance portfolio.
Where is research concerned with alliance portfolio management focused on? (two distinct interrelated topics)
- The creation of alliance capability through the engagement in multiple alliances
- The approaches and tools used to manage multiple simultaneous alliances
How is alliance capability defined?
What are the approaches and tools for alliance portfolio managment?
- The individual alliance level where the performance of the alliance is assessed,
- The business unit level where the performance of the alliance portfolio is assessed, and
- The corporate level where the effectiveness of the firm’s alliance policy is assessed.
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