The purpose of this thesis is to examine the process of strategic alliance of Korean firms in the computer and communication industry. This thesis primarily is focused on following research questions.
1) What are the major activities on the process of strategic alliance?
2) How is the performance of four stages of the alliance process to acquire high technologies in the computer and communication industry?
3) What are the differences in activities through four stages of the alliance process between korean cases and high performers of advanced countries in strategic alliance? What are more critical influence factors in differentiating their performance?
4) To succeed in strategic alliance, how firms could improve their performance of the process of strategic alliance?
First of all, this thesis reviews the related literatures, such as technology acquisition strategy, strategic alliance strategy, and strategic technology alliance strategy. Through literature reviews, it becomes clear that the strategy alliance is the most important activity in turbulent and rapidly changing environment.
This thesis presents the process model of strategic alliance composed of four sequential stages: strategy development, partner assessment, contract negotiations, and alliance operations. We consider four influence factors to activities in each process: firm environment, industry environment, and firm strategy and organization.
To validate the model, three cases are selected and analyzed such as: the large computer, the fault-tolerant computer, and the mobile communication system development case. The major findings are as follows: the most important factors that differentiate the cases from highly experienced companies are anticipation of key alliance business risks, careful examination of alliance business plan for analytical soundness, rigorous resource planning and defining resource contributions, knowledge of partner's alliance experience, and strategies to accommodate partner's management style. Also, some factors are affected by the organization style. Those are rigorous resource planning and defining resource contributions, examination of partner's resource capability gap, and examination of partner's strengths and weaknesses.
The case study provides several managerial and policy implications as follows: First, the understanding of some benefits of win-win strategy should be made up by the participating firms in multilateral alliances. They should build new alliance rules and culture. Second, more efforts should be made to acquire and deal partner's information such as: development information sources, data analysis, and infra structure to share them. Third, training of capable managers are needed to deal the different culture organization. There is shortage of managers who can harmonize with foreign firms. Finally, government should aggressively sponsor strategic alliances of firms by funding or providing demands. In some cases, government's support was the most positive influence factors to the strategic alliance process and their results.
