| Summary: | Strategic alliances are rapidly gaining increased popularity among practitioners as well as within academia, and they today account for significant parts of the value of many companies. This thesis aims to study the areas of strategic alliances and to deal with mainly three questions; the underlying reasons for alliance formation, the prerequisites for success and the possible causes offailure. Multiple definitions of the concept exist; however, the main theme is that strategic alliances involve several companies entering into a partnership in order to achieve a common goal.The underlying reasons for entering strategic alliances are for example risksharing,product rationalization, complementary technology transfers, competition restrictions and the enabling of international expansion. Despite the obvious benefits, statistics show that the majority of strategic alliances fail. The explanatory variables include a bad choice of partner and the failure to create structures and effective internal decision-making processes. Furthermore, studies onthe topic of alliance success present a unanimous picture; alliances that succeed can all be characterized by trust, a relationship where the parties can rely on each other. In order to demonstrate the theoretical foundation, a number of cases on real alliances in recent times are presented, with examples ranging across several industries, including the real estate and financial services industry. Finally the thesis argue that companies that make the right choice of partner in addition to other central choices in terms of the alliance formation process has more favorable prospects of success.
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