bly line to where VDO – a German instrument manufacturer –
builds and installs the cockpit. Other specialist companies supply
and install complete modules for lighting and electrics, doors,
engines and axles and so on. Each company employs its own man-
agers and work force but they work as members of an integrated
team in the purpose-built factory at Hambach in France.
Other alliances can be based upon shared knowledge. This type of
alliance will often involve technology/R&D transfer or it could
involve marketplace knowledge or access. The key to success in this
type of alliance is to recognize that both partners are looking for dif-
ferent outcomes and that it may not be long-term. These types of
alliance can be formed to exploit a technology or a market or to
solve problems that may be beyond the financial means of one
partner alone.
Quinn^13 has suggested some of the foundations for successful
alliances:
● Jointly developed goals and plans. Many companies have found that openly
sharing their overall goals for the project with partners, and then jointly
developing explicit goals for the project team’s management, can elimi-
nate much confusion and ill feeling.
● Avoiding niche collisions. Each party needs to analyse carefully where each
partner might intrude into the sacred territory of the other – geo-
graphical, demographic, customer, technology, or componentry niches of
strategic importance – and block these off by corporate-wide agree-
ments for a finite period.
● Structuring the team. Alliances need teams to manage the shared
processes and these teams need to reflect the technical and business
issues that the alliance was established to confront. They must be
empowered to take decisions and hence require representation from
senior management in their membership.
● Clear communication links. Having clear contact points at the technical-
operating, project manager and top management levels – especially in
the early stages – can avoid conflicts in information and impressions
conveyed. Often, confusion comes as much from misunderstandings
about whom to contact or ignorance of the partner’s internal processes
and decision rules as it does from the complexity of the information to
be transferred.
● Understanding cultures. Creative companies, operating in adhocracies,
generally find their programmes slowed by the bureaucracies of the
more conservative partners. Cultural conflicts are especially acute with
The supplier and alliance market domain 175