Abstract

Strategic alliance represents an important business activity for firms to access desirable resources and to enhance their competitive advantages. An important task concerning strategic alliance is alliance formation prediction, which can help a firm anticipate possible alliance actions of its rivals and accordingly develop strategies to prevent their partnering opportunities or neutralize the advantages the rivals can gain from these alliance actions. Previous studies on alliance formation prediction investigate various factors affecting the likelihood of alliance formation but incur some limitations. Among them, the most critical limitation is that most of prior studies concentrated on factors pertaining to financial and managerial factors and seldom exploited the utility of technological factors for alliance formation prediction. The growing importance of technology and innovation for competitive advantages makes it critical for firms to consider and assess technological factors in their strategic alliance partner selection. In response, we propose a technological-based strategic alliance formation prediction technique, which employs multiple dimensions of technological resource as the predictors to predict whether two firms will form a strategic alliance. On the basis of 201 strategic alliance cases and 392 non-strategic alliance cases, our empirical evaluation shows our proposed technique can achieve promising prediction effectiveness.

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