The Dynamic Evolution Of Alliance Portfolio

Frequent alliance activities make the enterprise inevitably embedded in a dense network of relationships. Bilateral alliance research, represented by a single strategic alliance, has been unable to adapt to the needs of the development of alliance management practices, and the multilateral alliances research, like alliance portfolio research, begins to rise. This paper, focusing on the question of why and how alliance portfolio emerge, evolve, and change, discusses the boundary of alliance portfolio from the dimension of internal, external, time, and space, and explains the causes of alliance portfolio from many explanatory variables, such as microfoundation, microdynamics, macro-design, external environment, focal firm strategy and alliance portfolio configuration.By time series analysis approach, this paper first divides the Tencent's alliance portfolio development process into three stages:(1) the initial exploration stage,(2) the steady development stage, and(3) the optimization and upgrade stage, and then makes an embedded analysis on the content of cooperation between Tencent and its key portfolio partners. Based on the longitudinal case study of Tencent, this paper identifies three types of alliance portfolio:(1) survival alliance portfolio,(2) business alliance portfolio, and(3) ecological alliance portfolio. This paper also builds a more complete model of the dynamic evolution process of alliance portfolio, and the new model can be summarized into three levels:(1) the dynamic evolution of focal firm,(2) the dynamic evolution of alliance portfolio, and(3) the co-evolution of focal firm strategy and alliance portfolio configuration. This study argues that the dynamic evolution process of alliance portfolio is the result of the interaction of many factors including internal, external, macro, meso, and micro factors, which possess the characteristics of stages and levels. Managers will benefit from managing alliance portfolio by judging its stage, improving its entire performance of alliance portfolio, enhancing prominence attraction, and so on. With the expansion of alliance portfolio scale, this process more complicated, and more effective management methods deserve more attention.