Description

For any entrepreneur or student seeking to make a strategic and beneficial alliance.

Help entrepreneurs prepare for, create, and manage alliances.

In today’s economy, many entrepreneurs have found themselves considering, or even involved in, an alliance without a strong understanding of the best way to proceed. In order to provide entrepreneurs with the information they need, Entrepreneurial Alliances explains how to successfully create, maintain, and manage alliances.  

Features

For any entrepreneur or student seeking to make a strategic and beneficial alliance.

Help entrepreneurs prepare for, create, and manage alliances.

In today’s economy, many entrepreneurs have found themselves considering, or even involved in, an alliance without a strong understanding of the best way to proceed. In order to provide entrepreneurs with the information they need, Entrepreneurial Alliances explains how to successfully create, maintain, and manage alliances. 

Understanding the full process: Lifecycle Approach. Entrepreneurs are known for blazing a trail through the unexplored in terms of business—but where alliances are concerned, it doesn’t hurt to have a detailed outline on what to expect. This text has been organized by a Lifecycle Approach, which walks readers through every step of the alliance process, addressing themes like:

• Why an entrepreneurial firm would want to enter into an alliance (Chapters 1 and 2).
• Issues in the formation process and partner sequence (Chapters 3, 4, and 5).
• Likely challenges that are bound to arise and how the company could become better at managing a portfolio of alliances (Chapters 6 and 7).
• How an entrepreneurial company can improve managing alliances (Chapter 8).
• How entrepreneurial companies can evaluate the performance of a single alliance and the alliances in its expanding portfolio (Chapter 9).

Offering a perfect blend: Balance of Economic and Behavioral Perspectives. Issues like communication, trust, shared decision-making, and conflict management are often overlooked in purely economic treatments of alliances—but it’s necessary to understand the importance of these issues in order to maintain a successful alliance. This text’s approach reinforces that effective alliances are created when both the economic and behavioral issues are understood and catered to.

Addressing the issues of today: Current Discussions of Alliance Management Topics. This text’s discussion of entrepreneurial alliances covers some of the most recent developments in the management of alliances. Topics include:  

• When to use an alliance instead of alternative approaches.
• Which types of conflict will develop between partners and how to overcome them.
• How to evaluate the performance of a portfolio of alliances.

Seeing it from all sides: Insight for Entrepreneurs and Alliance Managers. This text offers recommendations that are valuable for both entrepreneurs and managers who oversee alliances in larger, more established firms:

• For entrepreneurs this text fills an important gap in the entrepreneurship literature by discussing a topic that is increasingly critical to a start-up company’s chances of success but which there is limited information available about.  
• For alliance managers in larger firms, this text not only provides insights that can be used in approaching entrepreneurial companies about forming alliances, but also addresses some topics of general importance to help managing alliances in other areas.

Getting the picture: A Broad Range of Examples. This text helps bring the concepts to life by presenting a wide variety of examples that have been taken from diverse industries, including service and manufacturing, as well as from different countries and multinational alliances.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction to Entrepreneurial Alliances
Chapter 2: Motivations for Entrepreneurial Alliances
Chapter 3: Alliance Governance
Chapter 4: Finding the Right Partner
Chapter 5: Negotiating Entrepreneurial Alliances
Chapter 6: Executing Entrepreneurial Alliances
Chapter 7: Multi-Party Alliances and Alliance Portfolios
Chapter 8: Cultivating Alliance Management Capabilities
Chapter 9: Performance Evaluation of Entrepreneurial Alliances