Motives for strategic alliance: A resource-based perspective

There has been an explosive growth of various forms of interfirm strategic alliance, both domestically and internationally, in recent years. Most studies of these alliances have employed traditional theories such as transaction cost analysis. However some scholars comment that the unique characteristics of this type of interfirm collaboration challenge the explanatory power of these theories. This article is an exploratory attempt to explain strategic alliance formation from the resource-based approach, which has so far been neglected by researchers in this area. Five major motives for strategic alliance, namely creation of rents, expansion of resource usage, diversification of resource usage, imitation of resources and disposal of resources are discussed in detail. A brief comparison of the resource-based perspective with transaction cost theory is also made in the article.

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