How to Manage a Portfolio of Alliances

Returns to alliance portfolio diversity: The relative effects of partner diversity on firm's innovative performance and productivity

“…A firm should not only assess the match with a potential partner, although this remains important, but could be better off when also assesses the potential partner's contribution to, and (dis)synergies with, the alliance portfolio. In line with Hoffmann (2005), firms benefit from developing and implementing an alliance portfolio strategy.…”

“…The focal firm thus makes a trade-off between the benefits obtained from diverse partner types and the resources required to maintain productive relationships. Alliances require substantial monitoring and control (e.g., Faems, Janssens, Madhok, & Van Looy, 2008;Gulati & Singh, 1998) and as a consequence the focal firm may not be able to deal with high levels of APD (Hoffmann, 2005). Moreover, attention based view suggests that high levels of APD could lead to information overflow.…”

Open innovation in the food and beverage industry

“…Nevertheless, a number of alliance scholars (Hoffmann, 2005) note that when the number of partners is high and the complexity of an alliance portfolio increases, the firm will have to use more resources to manage this alliance, which could have a negative impact on performance. The arguments put forward to construct hypothesis 1a in relation to agents' bounded rationality are valid in the case of formal cooperation agreements.…”

Alliance portfolio diversity, radical and incremental innovation: The moderating role of technology management

“…Following Kale and Singh (2009: 57), a distinction can be made between alliance capability (aiming at managing single alliances) and alliance portfolio capability. The latter concept refers to a firm's ability to manage its set of alliances as a portfolio and comprises the development and implementation of a portfolio strategy, the monitoring and coordination of the alliance portfolio, and the institutionalization of multi-alliance management (Hoffman, 2005). We focus on a specific set of alliance portfolio activities relevant in the context of technological collaboration and stressed by several scholars (Duysters et al, 1999;Parise and Casher, 2003).…”

“…In this regard, a recent literature review on alliance management (Kale and Singh, 2009) concluded that a vast majority of scholarly work has focused on the management of single inter-organizational relationships. The same study observed that alliance portfolios bring new managerial challenges (Hoffman, 2007;Hoffman, 2005). First, an organization needs to assess to what extent the composition of its alliance portfolio is in fit with its strategic needs.…”