Auteur
Olga Bruyaka
Abstract
The meaning of diversity and its implications have fascinated researchers in different disciplines for a long time. Thus, natural scientists have studied biodiversity as variety of species. Sociologists and organizational behaviour scholars have investigated work-place and demography diversity as differences in attributes of individuals and groups. In strategy, the concept of diversity has been studied at the population level as organizational forms’ heterogeneity, and at the firm level as diversification. Recently, researchers in strategy and entrepreneurship have started exploring diversity in the context of inter-organizational relationships. Alliance portfolio diversity (APD), in particular, has been of interest for scholars, and it is in the focus of the present paper.
There are several reasons explaining academic interest in studying APD. First, nowadays companies have to manage a portfolio of alliances (e.g., R&D, marketing, licensing, etc.) including increasingly diverse array of partners (e.g., upstream, downstream, and horizontal). Therefore, there is a need to broaden the analysis by looking not only at a particular type of partners or alliances, but also at all partners and alliances in alliance portfolio. Second, alliance portfolio diversity concept is notable because of the oppositions in theoretical arguments and empirical evidence they are accompanied with. Existing academic studies (e.g., Goerzen & Beamish, 2005; Lee, 2007) based on contradictory predictions from different theoretical perspectives report mixed results about the consequences of proliferation and increasing diversity of business relationships at firm level. Partly, it is due to differences in meanings that scholars attribute to the concept of alliance portfolio diversity and due to
different operational measures they use.
The objective of the present paper is to formulate a set of guidelines susceptible to direct future research on alliance portfolio diversity. First, we suggest that the concept of alliance portfolio diversity should be studied along two dimensions: partners’ and alliance ties’ diversity. Second, though diversity increases with size, these are different alliance portfolio characteristics, which should be conceptually and empirically distinguished. The number of alliance ties and/or partners reflects portfolio size. Accounting for both alliance ties’ and partners’ types, on the one hand, and alliance portfolio size, on the other hand, permits to fully capture the meaning of alliance portfolio diversity. Third, we propose a conceptual framework that includes four archetypes of alliance portfolio (Economical Diversifiers, Active Diversifiers, Ties and Partners Multiplying Diversifiers) according to dimensions of diversity (partners’ and ties’ diversity) and to portfolio size.
