| Summary: |
Empirical research indicates that strategic alliances, like other organisational forms, emerge as an adaptive mechanism to market uncertainty, and theri developments over time reflect the co-evolution of distinctive firm capabilities and of industry and market activities. Interestingly, most strategic alliances go through similar coevolutionary cycle in terms of their motives and capabilities toward the cooperative relationship. Studies in this area show that alliance failure is an outcome of the coevolutionary adjustment to changes in the market, the competitive dynamics between partners, and assessment of efficiency of the alliances as an alternative governance structure. It is thus critical to adopt a dynamics perspective and historical observations of cooperative process. This paper attempts to distil, derie and integrate theories acroos different perspectives into a unified framework that offers a better understanding of alliance process development. Our analysis shows that we can divide strategic alliance development into three phases of development: formation, operation and evaluation. We further endeavour to seek the important factors that should be taken into account in each stage of their life.
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