The Alliance Capability of Technology-Based Born Globals

While earlier research discussed networking and alliance strategies of born globals on a strategic level, this paper investigates and analyses the specific organizational skills that enable the firms to successfully initiate, manage and finish their R&D alliances with Multinational Enterprises (MNEs). It is discussed how the specific aspects of the alliance capability can help born globals to counteract the challenges and risks of collaborating with MNEs. A longitudinal process study of a Danish technology born global with three embedded cases of its R&D and marketing alliances with Asian MNEs is discussed. The organizational skills comprising the alliance capability are defined to be internal and external assessment skills, need detection and coupling skills, asset protection skills, project management skills, termination skills and the learning processes to build the alliance capability further. A set of propositions is developed to tie these organizational skills to alliance performance.