Abstract: In the modern world, to face a market alone is a big challenge for businesses, which aims to survive into a globalized system against big competitors that have a greater productive chain than oneself, pretending to be David, the young man who beat Goliath. This leads to many businesses to lose their path into market and be left behind, turning competitively obsolete, without enough resources to innovate. A movement that can avoid these hardships is the formation of a strategic alliance.
Keywords: Globalized System, Big competitors, Resources,
Innovate, Strategic Alliance.
The economic world is too complex to maintain an individualistic mentality within a business, where a rod is easy to break but many together make a greater resistance. While it is known, you cannot just coexist without the help of anyone, “It isn't possible to be excellent in everything” (Giner & col, 2000). Here's where a strategic alliance allows taking advantage of valuable resources between two or more companies.
With this we can define that
strategic alliances are partnerships of two or more corporations or business
units that work together to achieve strategically significant objectives that
are mutually beneficial (Elmuti & Kathawala,
2001).
In this way the parts join to
achieve competitive advantages that wouldn't obtain in a short term without a
great effort (Universidad
Intercontinental, Área Empresarial, 2010) or
simply they will not obtain them or simply they will not obtain them. At the
moment of making these alliances, you will be allowed to obtain improvements
in:
·
Productive capacity
·
Product quality
·
Channels of distribution
·
Entering new markets
·
Labor force
·
Price
·
Services
·
Financial capacities
·
Reducing costs
·
Technology and machinery.
These goals become achievable
thanks that with the union of both parts exist mutual commitments, sharing
risks and opportunities, obtaining a stable source of fund for the use of the
know-how that each company has.
Due to this strategic alliances
allow to leave aside the rivalry between competitors, since rivalries can be
destructive and is not enough to just ignore them, avoid them or trying to
contain them, instead, effective leaders become from rivals into partners (Uzzi & Dunlap, 2012).
A strategic alliance comprises
diverse stages including: development strategy, assessment of the partner,
contract negotiation, operation of the alliance, and alliance termination. This
is intended to achieve a balance between both parts for its proper development
since many partnerships tend to fail for not taking in mind the partner's
profile that is needed and, on the other hand, the diverse cultural differences
that tend to be a comprehension problem.
There are many types of strategic
alliances that can be conformed depending on the necessities that are required;
the most common between companies is a Joint Venture that consists in "an
agreement by two or more parties to form a single entity to undertake a certain
project" (Išoraitė, 2009) and for businesses that are just beginning to undertake there is the
Venture Capital that "is the early stage form of private equity where
investors focus on investing in startup (highly risky) ventures" (PrivCo, 2014). There
also exist consortiums that can be of research and development (R+D) or export,
the strategic outsourcing, cross-ownership, franchises, licenses, etc.
There isn't a basic rule on the
creation of a strategic alliance, as is well-known, everything arises depending
on the existing need, like in past times, people learned to unite skills to
obtain food, while nowadays the union of forces is practically for the same
goal but from a widely different perspective, and that perspective is of
remaining stable within a market segment, obtaining profits in both parts.
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