Portfolio management of strategic alliances: An international business perspective

This paper extends the Integration–Responsiveness (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989 and Prahalad and Doz, 1987) international business framework of multinational companies (MNCs) strategies in order to explain the MNC's various approaches to managing strategic alliance portfolios. Our research shows that the alliance portfolios of MNCs differ significantly with respect to partner integration and partner heterogeneity. We argue that the choice regarding the management of alliance portfolios depends on the MNC's international strategy. The empirical results reveal the impact of local responsiveness through the partner heterogeneity, and the impact of MNC integration on the level of global partner integration respectively.