Value Co-Creation in Industrial Buyer-Seller Partnerships ... - Doria

theories on resource dependencies (Pfeffer & Nowak 1976, Pfeffer & Salancick 1978) andlater by a vast amount of literature on business relationships and networks produced by theIMP group. In the IMP literature on relationships and the literature on strategic alliancescompanies are seen to be engaged in long-term relationships in order to take advantage ofgains associated with cooperation, here referred to as value co-creation.In the conceptual discussion it was established that companies create relationships withpartners in order to get access to resources possessed by others if the outcome of theassessment of the trade-off between benefits of involvement and sacrifices of involvement ispositive. In the focal case the companies explicitly state that their business relationship is apartnership. Therefore there is in the next sections a brief review of what both strategicmanagement literature and marketing literature says about alliances between companies.Taking the strategic management perspective on relationships it is argued that companiesestablish alliances with partners in order to achieve something that cannot be achievedalone, supporting the ideas presented in industrial marketing about business relationships. Abroad definition of an alliance is:“ Collaborative efforts between companies in which they pool their resources in aneffort to achieve mutually compatible goals that they could not achieve easily alone(Lambe et al. 2002, p 141).Alliances are claimed to be established in order to solve a problem that one of the partiescould not do alone (Borys & Jemison 1989). One of the most obvious reasons of enteringalliances is the lack of certain capabilities (i.e. resources) for being successful (Das & Teng2000, Day 1995, Hunt 1997). By cooperating and joining resources something more can beachieved than a single company could do alone (Dyer & Singh 1998).Cooperative relationships between companies are regarded as “ alternative forms” ofgovernance between markets and hierarchies (Ring & Van de Ven 1992, Ghosh & John1999) or hybrid organizational arrangements (Borys & Jemison 1989). Usually cooperativerelationships are referred to as strategic alliances and can take different forms (Anand &Khanna 2000, Lambe et al. 2002, Vyas et al. 1995, Anderson & Narus 1990, Dubois &Gadde 2000, Gadde & Snehota 2000). Examples of alliances are: manufacturer-supplierpartnerships, strategic purchasing arrangements, joint ventures, outsourcing, technologylicensing agreements, and different forms of R&D consortia (Lambe et al. 2002, Morgan &Hunt 1994, Varadarajan & Cunningham 1995).Borys and Jemison (1989) discuss four different types of strategic alliances, namelymergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and supplier arrangements.They collect all these inter-organizational arrangements under the umbrella of “ hybridorganizational arrangements” . The organizational phenomenon of a hybrid is defined as:80