Entrepreneurship and strategic alliances
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Alliances date to the beginning of the world as we know it, with early collaborations between Greek city states formed to defeat Persia (Smith et al., 1995). However, present-day academic interest in business alliances is largely rooted in the late 1970s and early 1980s when joint ventures were studied as vehicles for U.S. multinationals to expand internationally. Alliances were often equity joint ventures geared to respond to foreign governments' restrictions on foreign direct investment. Typically the foreign investor sought local market access, technology transfer was unilateral, and collaborations tended to take place in commodity and other, less advanced industries. Today, however, alliances often involve complex deal structures, bilateral knowledge flows, and the blending of cooperation and competition amongst rivals (Reuer, 2004). During the last three decades, there has been an impressive rise in alliance research, with studies examining topics as diverse as investment patterns, organizational governance choices, network structures, trust formation, and so forth. There have been many special issues devoted to alliances in the leading journals, and alliances often represent a major share of presentations at management and strategy conferences. Alliance research has arguably become a cottage industry of sorts, and many alliance phenomena have been studied extensively despite the relatively short history of this stream of research. Given these developments in practice and theory, we believe that entrepreneurship is one of the most important and interesting frontiers for research on alliance phenomena. Most of the prior research on strategic alliances examines these relationships from the perspective of established, large firms. However, alliances can also be critically important to entrepreneurial firms (Alvarez and Barney, 2001; Ireland et al., 2006). Today's competitive environment finds entrepreneurial firms increasingly using strategic alliances to accomplish many objectives, ranging from obtaining cost efficiencies to exploring new options in distant markets to obtaining resources such as financial capital or legitimacy from other firms. It is striking, therefore, that comparatively little is known about alliances in entrepreneurial settings. To date, with a few exceptions, the contributions of entrepreneurship perspectives to the alliance literature, and vice-versa, have been relatively limited. Important questions arise concerning what entrepreneurial alliances are like, whether and how they are different from "traditional" alliances, how alliances operate in entrepreneurial contexts of uncertainty (Alvarez and Barney, 2005), how alliances might help large or small firms become more entrepreneurial in their strategies (e.g., Ireland et al., 2006), and how the opportunities and challenges associated with various alliances and networks change as firms evolve. These are but a few of the many research opportunities at the intersection of the entrepreneurship and alliance literatures. The papers presented in this volume begin to make progress on joining these two streams of research as a means of providing important contributions to the entrepreneurship and alliance literatures. 2005.
