Strategic Alliances and Partnerships

Strategic alliances and partnerships are becoming increasingly important in today's business development environment. Here are some resources on the topic.

Publications/Books

• Alliance Advantage: The Art of Creating Value Through Partnering, by Yves L. Doz, Gary Hamel, Harvard Business School Pr. (June 1998). An excerpt from the Amazon.com book description says, "A fundamentally new approach to the value created through alliances, Alliance Advantage challenges the assumption that the economics of an alliance are the same as those of a joint venture. By exploring the underlying reasons why companies enter alliances, the unique opportunities for value creation such alliances provide, and the processes through which each stakeholder learns from its interactions, the authors help bridge the gap between expectations and outcomes."
• Joint Ventures and Corporate Partnerships, A Step-by-Step Guide to Forming Strategic Business Alliances by Jennifer Lindsey. Probus Publishing Co., 1989; and Business Alliances Guide: The Hidden Competitive Weapon, by Robert Porter Lynch. New York, NY. John Wiley & Sons. 1993.
• Zero Time: Providing Instant Customer Value—Every Time, All the Time; Raymond Yeh, Keri Pearlson, and George Kozmetsky; July 2000. This recent book examines the organizations that will thrive in the global digital business world, where the speed of change is limited only by the laws of physics. The authors' contend that viable companies in the near future will be those that achieve the calm—the "zero time"—at the eye of the storm of change, by learning to move at lightspeed. These "Zero Time" companies will react to change before it happens.