CHAPTER 8: Strategic Alliances

This chapter examines how strategic alliances can be a vehicle for achieving important strategic objectives—such as lowering costs, creating new sources of differentiation or entering new markets. A strategic alliance—sometimes referred to as a partnership between firms—is a cooperative arrangement in which two or more firms combine their resources and capabilities to create new value. Strategy scholars sometimes refer to these types of arrangements, in which firms cooperate to create advantages, as cooperative strategy or a relational advantage.