Choosing How Tight to Bond: The Interplay between Corporate Combinations, Alliances and Networks

The dynamics of the contemporary business environment pushes companies to collaborate, forming industry trade unions, alliances and engaging in M&A transactions. This paper explores the interplay between the various forms of collaboration between companies: professional networks, strategic alliances and corporate combinations, attempting to reveal how interdependent they are. The results demonstrate significant interrelations, revealing certain patterns of collaborative endeavors´ evolution. The paper reveals that alliancing tends to be focused on either specialization or diversification and that different collaborative patterns are activated to promote exploratory and exploitative endeavors. Also, it reveals that alliances and M&A are not conducted simultaneously.