Strategic Alliance Research in the Era of Digital Transformation: Perspectives on Future Research

Abstract

The emerging digital transformation in the twenty‐first century is rapidly and significantly changing the business landscape. The fast‐changing activities, expectations and new modes of collaboration suggest it is time to review the current theoretical insights from strategic alliance (SA) research, which are based on assumptions from a different era. We therefore aim to stimulate multidisciplinary debate and theoretical reflections to better understand emerging paradoxes and challenges that contemporary firms face in the formation, evolution and dissolution of strategic alliances. Specifically, we offer alternative visions of SA research and suggest fresh applications or supplements of existing theoretical perspectives and research methods that can better address the research questions emerging from an era of digital transformation.

A (Re)view of the Philosophical Foundations of Strategic Management

“…The assumptions underlying mainstream strategic management theories were developed in the past. This situation calls for further conceptual development to better understand contemporary strategic management and to address novel phenomena such as those emerging from the increasingly rapid changes in the economic, political, social and technological environments (He et al., 2020; Teece, 2020). Finally, a phenomenon can be addressed with different onto‐epistemological approaches (e.g.…”

Digital transformation as an interaction-driven perspective between business, society, and technology

“…Lastly, as the rules of the business game got changed, businesses increasingly rework their business model (Berghaus & Back, 2016;von Leipzig et al, 2017). Changes in the business model include focusing on eco-systems (and industry borders fading) (Subramaniam, Iyer, & Venkatraman, 2019), creating new strategic alliances (He, Meadows, Angwin, Gomes, & Child, 2020), moving from products to services (Frank, Mendes, Ayala, & Ghezzi, 2019), ceasing physical fronts, and so forth.…”

Processes Underlying Interfirm Cooperation

“…Various theories have been used to explain cooperative arrangements between firms. These include agency theory, knowledge-based view, resource-based view, dynamic capabilities view, resource dependence theory, transaction cost economics, social exchange theory, relational theory and institutional theory (for details, see Agostini, Nosella and Teshome, 2019;Cao et al, 2018;He et al, 2020;Parmigiani and Rivera-Santos, 2011). In simple terms, firms use IFC when such arrangements are in comparison to internalization or market transactions deemed to possess an efficient form of business governance (Parmigiani and Rivera-Santos, 2011).…”

“…At the industry level, there has been unprecedented growth in services and information technology (IT)-enabled transactions, and rapidly increasing importance of artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, internet of things, automation, 3D-printing and disruptive innovation (Alcácer, Cantwell and Piscitello, 2016;He et al, 2020). These developments -often referred to as the 'new Processes Underlying Interfirm Cooperation 11 industrial revolution' (Mims, 2019) -have changed industry-level knowledge requirements, and are forcing firms to redraw the boundaries between industries and consider anew how to effectively reposition themselves.…”

“…Although different types of mechanisms (e.g. control, governance, cognitive, social, legitimation) have been examined in the literature (He et al, 2020;Parmigiani and Rivera-Santos, 2011), we need additional knowledge of such processes to enable a deeper understanding of the IFC phenomenon. Given the variety in nature and scope of IFC, it is possible to generate advanced knowledge only when scholars expose us, through their research, to insights that are new, novel and relevant.…”