Strategic alliances in information technology

Strategic Alliances (StrAls) represent a new response to today's changing economic environment as defined by increasing global competition, scarce resources, market segmentation, hybridization of technologies, and rapid rates of technological advance. StrAls can be described as organizational arrangements and operating policies through which separate organizations share administrative authority, form social links, accept joint ownership, and in which looser, more open-ended contractual agreements replace highly specific, arms-length contracts. This paper presents a coherent picture of the current trends in StrAls and identifies indicators influencing their creation. Within the technology domain, it depicts the field that has attracted the most international networking activity and created a profound impact on all aspects of economic development: Information Technology. Our empirical findings are based on a dataset comprised of more than 27,000 agreements that occurred between 1984 and 1994. We present a detailed descriptive analysis that maps the trends of StrAls worldwide, along with a model that establishes a relationship between the type of alliance occurring and a set of prognostic factors describing country and firm characteristics.