Interorganizational relationships are recognized as an increasingly important source of competitive advantage. Hence, goal‐oriented management of the alliance portfolio—all the alliances of the focal firm—plays a decisive role in company performance. Consequently, the configuration and development of the alliance portfolio become important strategic issues. In light of that, this article develops theoretical propositions that seek to clarify what determines the configuration and evolution of an alliance portfolio, and then presents the results of a longitudinal study to illustrate the developed theoretical framework. Building on contingency theory and a coevolutionary framework, we were able to identify three distinctive types of portfolio strategies at business level and to illustrate how they interact with the development of the business strategy and the business environment. Encompassing all this, the study illustrates and explains developmental paths and patterns in the evolution of an alliance portfolio. The developmental course typically evolves from adapting to shaping and to exploiting (stabilizing), according to the state of strategic uncertainty and the firm's resource endowment. A sudden increase in exogenous strategic uncertainty, however, can lead to a strategic shift back to an exploration or hybrid strategy. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Research streams on competition and cooperation are central to the field of strategic management but have evolved independently. The emerging literature on coopetition has brought attention to the phenomenon of simultaneous competition and cooperation, yet the interplay between the two has remained under-researched. We offer a roadmap for studying this interplay, which identifies some of its antecedents and consequences, highlights debates concerning the nature of competition and cooperation and the association between the two, and directs attention to the tension between competition and cooperation and the alternative approaches for managing this tension. We discuss the broader implications of the interplay, note some intriguing open questions, offer directions for future research, and present an organizing framework for the interplay of competition and cooperation.

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DRKS00007768; Pre-results.

This paper seeks to analyze the effects of interorganizational trust on the decision to vertically integrate a strategically important activity (‘make’) or sign a long‐term agreement with an external exchange partner to perform such an activity in collaboration (‘cooperate’). On the basis of the literature available on interorganizational trust in economics and sociology, we aim at theoretically and empirically disentangling opportunism‐based and opportunism‐independent effects of trust on governance choices. We develop a set of hypotheses on the moderating and direct roles of trust, which are tested using a sample of integration/collaboration decisions made by Austrian and German automotive suppliers. The results confirm both an opportunism‐mitigating effect of trust that lowers the transaction costs of a collaborative exchange and an opportunism‐independent effect that increases the transaction value of a collaborative exchange and also encompasses non‐economic motives for collaboration.

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