Auteurs
Louis MULOTTE
Pierre DUSSAUGE
Résumé
Both researchers and practitioners have long argued that firms can use alliances as a means to more easily enter new businesses or new markets. Indeed, alliances can provide access to necessary but difficult-to-trade resources and thus help the entering firm gather all the resources required to operate in the targeted business. Other authors, however have emphasized the downsides of alliances: they provide only incomplete access to the targeted resources, they create a dependence on partners, they are difficult and costly to manage and, finally, entail a sharing of profits. This leads many firms to choose to enter new business areas directly, without previously forming any sort of partnership with incumbents. In this broad context, we will address two sets of questions: (i) what factors drive newcomers to choose between entering alone vs. forming alliances in order to enter a new business area? (ii) how do these entry strategies influence subsequent success and survival in the new area of business. Drawing upon the resource-based view, we develop arguments suggesting that entry strategy is influenced by firm capabilities. We predict that entry through alliances, while allowing weaker firms to overcome entry barriers, does not result in superior long-term performance. We test our predictions on a sample of firms that have eventually established a stand-alone presence in the aerospace industry through sequential vs. direct entry and, with two-stage treatment models, we assess their post-entry performance accounting for the endogeneity of their entry strategy choice.
