Strategic Alliance Management, 3rd Edition

23 ALLIANCE CAPABILITIES

DOI: 10.4324/9781003222187-23

A firm’s alliance capability refers to its ability to design, manage and terminate alliances successfully. An alliance capability thus can enhance the overall performance of a firm’s alliances in that it enables the firm to purposefully create, extend or modify the routines it uses to inform its alliance decision making. Firms develop alliance capabilities over time, but they also tend to capture only minimal knowledge or develop just a few best practices. In an environment with few alliances, such an ad hoc approach may be effective; however, the increasing importance of alliances implies that an unstructured approach will ultimately produce frustrating, unsatisfactory results. In contrast, ...