Control, Trust And Alliance Risk In Vertical R&D Alliance

The intensive global competition drives the enterprises to pursue the innovation. The research and development of products are not limited to the interior manufacturers, but have been extended to the exterior supply system. It then gradually forms the research and development alliance vertically. However, the empirical researches indicate that the failure rate of alliance is over 50%, while the failure rate of research and development alliance is even higher. Consequently, it has been confronted with the dilemma of the fashion of collaborative development strategy and the high risk of research and development alliance. The risk control of research and development alliance becomes urgent to be further studied.Generally speaking, the present alliance researches mainly refer to the static analysis of the input and output of the alliance, namely the so-called "content". Such research mainly lays emphasis on the reasons of selecting the particular governance structure, or how to design the cooperative contract of alliance, in order to establish the incentive mechanism or punishment mechanism. Up to date, the researches on the research and development alliance mainly strive for the construction of the theoretical model or the logical demonstration, still lack in the dynamic researches on how to effectively manage the "process" of the collaborative research and development. In consequence, based on the specific management situation of the vertical research and development alliance in the automotive industry in China, mainly through quantitative researche methods with the auxiliary one of emulation experiment,this research will adopt the concept of the integration between the structure angle and relationship angle to strengthen the researches related to the control, trust and risk of the research and development alliance. To be specific, the paper mainly includes the following sections:â‘ It comprehensively and systematically identifies and classifies the risks of vertical research and development alliance, namely the relationship risk and performance risk. Meanwhile, by the aid of the empirical research based on the management situation in China, it constructs the risk measurement and the social control measurement of vertical research and development alliance and also summarizes the sources and mechanism of action of the risks and analyzes the behavior and characteristics of the management practice.â‘¡Based upon the literature review, it constructs the research model of control, trust and risks of research and development alliance and the relative research hypotheses. Then on the basis of the research model, it designs the research variables; meanwhile it deals with the gathering and treatment of samples and carries through the multiple regression analysis for the relationship between the social control, trust and performance risks of the alliance and the relationship between the official control, trust and performance risks of the alliance respectively. Furthermore, it takes the mediating effect testing and analysis to confirm the hypotheses.â‘¢From the angle of complex adaptive system, it adopts the multi-agent modeling simulation technology and refers to the"snowdrift games"model and"space prisoner's dilemma games"model, in order to establish the network model of research and development alliance and take the simulation evolution in the computer. The goals of simulation are to discuss the influence of alliance control on the individual attributes of agent, type evolution, gross earnings of alliance and network topology.The innovations of the paper include:â‘ It constructs the risk measurement of vertical research and development alliance and also summarizes the sources and mechanism of action of the risks; it constructs the social control measurement of the vertical research and development alliance and then analyzes the behavior and characteristics of the management practice. It lays a foundation of empirical research for the expansion of alliance control research area and the better understanding of the dynamic evolutionary process of alliance risks.â‘¡It adopts the quantitative research methods to take an innovative analysis on the inner mechanism of action of control and trust on the alliance risks. The results indicate: the alliance's social control and official control have a significant and negative influence on the alliance's performance risks. Trust in the alliance between the control and risk play a mediating role.â‘¢Based on the multi-agent modeling simulation, it studies the influence of alliance control on the network evolution of research and development alliance, as well as the alliance's gross earnings. The conclusions include: the application of social control can reduce the speculator percentage and enhance the percentage of mutually beneficial parties; while after applying the conflict control, no correlation has been found between the alliance's gross earnings and the percentage of the agent types in the beginning of evolution.