Study Of Strategic Alliance Based On Life Cycle Theory

With the economic globalization and rapid development of information technology, the market competition becomes increasingly severe. More and more enterprises have realized that depending on their own resources cannot grasp the quick-changing market opportunity. So they begin to give their attention to external resources. And strategic alliance, as an effective way to conform inside and outside resources based on core competences of enterprises, is becoming to be an ideal choice for many enterprises. Therefore, both in theoretic researches an in practical application, it is very important to study the life cycle of strategic alliance for enterprises.There are a lot of literatures about strategic alliance, but many of them are the static studies. And there are a few of scholars study the process of alliance evolution. Strategic alliance has it own life-cycle, just like any other organizations. With the change of alliance environment, the characters of alliance partners and the relationships between them will develop in the stage.In this paper, there are three sections. Firstly, the author generalizes the literatures about the life-cycle of strategic alliance. And in the most important section, a process model about the evolution of alliance in its life-cycle is proposed. Motive, trust, competitive advantage, resource investment and inter-partner conflicts are the alliance conditions. The paper discusses how firm characteristics determine these conditions and examine the role of alliance conditions in the different stages of alliance development. The last section in this paper is about the case of Sandvik-Atlas Copco alliance.