Abstract
The engagement of firms in multiple simultaneous strategic alliances with
various partners has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in today’s business
landscape. Prior strategic alliance literature has offered a wealth of perspectives on how firms learn to manage individual alliances and build alliance
capabilities by developing a dedicated alliance function. However, while such
studies are focused on dyadic alliances, scarce attention has been devoted
heretofore to the emerging phenomenon of triadic alliances. In order to shed
light on such phenomenon, this chapter explores the triadic alliance and
unveils some problems that epitomize such kind of alliances; that is, actor
mindframes, governance structure, alliance learning problems and conflict
management, and strategic and operational problems. Moreover, examining
a specific triadic alliance case study (i.e., 3SUN Alliance between Enel Green Power, Sharp, and STMicroelectronics) shows how the dyadic alliance function turns out to be hardly appropriate to handle the bundle of complexities
emerging from the four problems of triadic alliance settings. Furthermore,
the chapter unveils the triadic alliance problem and presents a comprehensive
proposition that emphasizes the need for firms to manage such complexities
by creating a specifically contingent set of triadic alliance mechanisms. The
chapter provides two significant contributions. First, by starting to unpack
the triadic alliance problem, it offers a theoretical contribution that facilitates
an improved understanding of this particular multipartner arrangement.
Second, it proposes a contribution helpful to practitioners in that it supplies
a set of fresh hints to build a flexible set of triadic alliance mechanisms to
manage strategically a portfolio of multipartner alliances.
Lingua originale | English |
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Titolo della pubblicazione ospite | Managing Multipartner Strategic Alliances |
Editor | T.K. Das |
Pagine | 133-167 |
Numero di pagine | 35 |
Stato di pubblicazione | Pubblicato - 2015 |
Keywords
- triadic alliance
- alliance