Technology Alliances For Competitiveness

Reviews the evolution of strategic alliances involving U.S. and Japanese companies in the semiconductor industry, and analyzes whether alliances can contribute to the renewal of an industry faced with stiff competition from Japan. Provides an overview of the changing nature of technology linkages in this important industry.

More than we ever anticipated, alliances among firms are changing the way business is conducted, particularly in the global, high-technology sector. The reasons are clear: companies must increasingly pool their capabilities to succeed in ever more complex and rapidly changing businesses. But the consequences for managers and for the economy have so far been underestimated. In this new book, Benjamin Gomes-Casseres presents the first in-depth account of the new world of business alliances and shows how collaboration has become part of the very fabric of modern competition. Alliances, he argues, create new units of competition that do battle with one another and with traditional single firms. The flexible capabilities of these multi-firm constellations give them advantages over single firms in certain contexts, offsetting the advantage of a single firm's unified control. When managed effectively, alliances can strengthen a firm's competitive advantage and narrow the gap between leading firms and second-tier players. This often results in intensified rivalry, and the competition within an industry is transformed. Alliances often spread swiftly through an industry as firms jockey for advantage. Yet the very spread of alliances increases their costs and poses new limits on their use. Gomes-Casseres concludes that firms need to manage their constellations to enhance collaboration within their groups, while raising what he calls "barriers to collaboration" for rivals. These ideas are developed and illustrated through original case studies of alliances among U.S., Japanese, and European firms in electronics and computers, including Xerox, IBM, and Fujitsu as well as other small and large companies. The book should be of interest to business academics, managers, and general readers concerned with contemporary capitalism.

This collection of essays focuses on the changing role of firms and states in shaping international competition. The way in which industry responds to this situation by forming strategic alliances both within industrial sectors and across national borders is examined.

Information Technology (IT) - the field that links computer and communications equipment and software - is transforming the way modern business is done. Examples of factors leading these changes are: rapidly decreasing costs of computer hardware, government de-regulation, accelerating global competitiveness, an increasing management awareness, and the knowledge of how to employ Information Technology successfully. These have all led to the increase of IT's effects on existing markets, and, in the process, are creating entirely new markets. This book explores a variety of advances in IT by a group of researchers who are at the cutting edge of this research. Moreover, the book examines these innovative developments in terms of the Information Technology field and its effect on modern business. It is becoming increasingly apparent that IT is critical to success in today's competitive marketplace. As a result, this book examines a host of emerging effects at work in these developments and seeks to make sense out of these counter-acting, sometimes multiplicative, effects which can become obstacles for managers who wish to develop competitive applications of IT. These effects and the development of IT are grouped into four general categories in the book: Future Markets, Inter-Organizational Systems, Focused Applications, and Future Strategies.