Building alliance capability : management techniques for superior alliance performance

Despite the fact that they represent a growing element of business strategy, alliances between organisations quite often result in failure. This is partly due to the fact that firms have not built up adequate capabilities to manage alliances. Special management techniques have to be implemented in order to strengthen the organisation’s alliance capability. This article evaluates a number of these techniques with regard to their impact on alliance success, and reports on a quantitative study on alliances and alliance-management techniques of 46 large companies to assess this impact.