Creating Profit Through Alliances - business models for collaboration E-book | Page 26

2.

Alliances as strategy accelerator
What competences do you have? –
and need?
Alliances are an important means to obtain new
competences for your organisation. However, the
choice to enter into an alliance should arise out of the
strategy of the company. With the strategy in mind,
the first question should be: what competences do
you already have? And which do you still need?
An internal analysis to assess your own competences
should result in a list of strong and weak points. The
necessary information can be derived from various
sources:



In the first chapter we discussed the relationship
between strategy and profitability. However, strategy
can only be executed with the right resources:
people, knowledge, machines, brand names or shops.
In case not all resources are available for the strategy
you have chosen, forging an alliance could be a way
to obtain them.
This chapter is about the decision to choose for a
strategic collaboration. With the value engineering
model, you can select which competences can best
be obtained through an alliance and which not. The
process of forging an alliance is summarised and to
make things clearer, the definition of a partnership is
introduced. The chapter closes with list of ten
common forms of alliances, which will be elaborated
in Chapt ers 3 and 4.
24





an analysis of your market share or sales
figures;
customer satisfaction surveys; but it can also be
illuminating to ask your customers why they
choose to purchase from you, and to ask noncustomers what you need to do to persuade
them to make that choice;
differences as compared to your competitors, for
instance in terms of company resources,
products, distribution, personnel qualifications,
or the quality of your marketing;
improvements that you are implementing in
your company, or deteriorations as a result of
personnel turnover.

When identifying your strong points, there is always
the risk of being insufficiently critical. The Resource
Based View11 can then prove useful, by subjecting
each strong point to the following questions: