| This study will investigate the evolution of strategic alliances by adopting an organizational life cycle framework. Specifically, we develop research around firms' alliance formation patterns, contending that these patterns will change across the stages of an organizational life cycle. Rather than treating it as a single broad concept, alliance formation will here be viewed in terms of specific aspects such as alliance objectives, partner type, alliance mode, international alliances, and resource creation aspect. We classified organizational life cycle stages as birth, growth, and maturity stages by adopting previous organizational life cycle frameworks. Corresponding hypotheses are tested using archival data of 216 biotechnology firms that entered 5463 alliances during 1991--2001 period. Our study found strong evidence that alliance formation actively takes place at the birth stage of life cycle. With respect to alliance objectives, firms are more inclined to form exploration alliances at the birth stage and exploration alliances at the growth or maturity stage. The result also suggests that firms are more likely to form non-equity alliances at the birth stage and equity alliances at the growth stage. The firms tend to ally with strategically similar partners at the birth or growth stage, and ally with strategically dissimilar partner at the maturity stage. It turned out that firms form international alliances regardless the stages of the life cycle. In addition, we found that the relationship between alliance formation and resource deepening was most positive and significant. This research will also offer a contribution to business practitioners, whose most urgent task is to make their firms grow and become stable. By observing strategic alliance formation patterns through life-cycle stages, it may be possible to predict the major problems, decisions, and opportunities associated with alliances. Overall, this study provides evidence of sequences of activities that firms tend to follow in evolutionary process as they form alliances. |
