Strategic Alliances and Innovations in the International Business

Abstract

The innovation process should be treated as ? multidiscipline and multidimensional process in which ? great number of people participate. With direct or indirect connections and through different communication channels, organization is able to approach wide spectrum of other organization resources, and this enables creation of larger number of projects with lower investments and risks. For an organization, entering the alliances is no longer the matter of finding new resources, but it becomes the main cause of strategic innovation and preparation for unpredictable future challenges and development. Cooperation among enterprises brings certain risks, among which are most often information drain, loss of the control and independence, conflicts because of different aims and interests, increased complexity, and all these factors can produce negative influence on innovation creation and on innovative potential of the participant. Although an alliance should reduce expenses, risk and time necessary for new product development, innovation process within an alliance can sometimes be very complicated and can appear to be more expensive solution in the end.

During the last decades, organizations have been under the constant pressure to make changes and to innovate. One of the factors of the highest influence certainly are new technologies, especially information technologies, which made the market globalization increasing and rising of new organization forms such as strategic networks and alliances. The interest for alliances and their contribution to performances of partner organizations is getting higher in modern conditions. An innovation today should not be seen as the product of only one actor, but as the result of cooperation between two or more parties.