Creating Profit Through Alliances - business models for collaboration E-book | Page 31

In some cases, sufficiently significant partnerships
demonstrably have a favourable impact on a
company's stock price. A study conducted between
2000 and 2002 into almost 900 announcements of
alliances involving German listed companies revealed
that, on the day of the announcement, the stock
index rose an average of
Required
3.8%. After two days
Objectives
competences
that figure still stood at
2.5%. The increase was
Own competences
strongest in high-tech
sectors and for smaller
companies entering an alliance with a larger
company. Licensing agreements and R&D alliances
were valued more than marketing alliances13.

The process of forging an alliance

Partnerships can be an effective way of achieving
your business objectives. But then your strategic

objectives should be formulated first. What market
(product, geography, distribution, payment model) do
you wish to target, and what competences does this
require? These are the first steps, as presented in
Figure 15.

Partner
selection

Collaboration
agreement

Implementation
of collaboration

Figure 15. Steps in the process to entering collaboration

You will already possess some of the competences or
resources, or they can be developed with relative
ease. The contrast with the competences you need to
obtain help define what your prospective partner
should contribute. This is the basis for partner
selection, in which you determine what company
offers the best potential for collaboration. This should
lead to the selection of one or two parties that seem
promising candidates for a partnership. The next step
is to draw up an agreement to formalise the
collaboration. The actual implementation of the
partnership will still require attention, however.
Although the company boards may soon find
themselves in agreement, people on the work floor
still need to get to know each other and make
practical arrangements.
As soon as you have established what competences
you possess and which you still need to build, you
can consider developing these in-house or obtaining
them by working with a company that already has
that knowledge. The result of this deliberation
depends on the extent to which that knowledge or
those resources help you to consolidate your unique
market position.

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