期刊名称：Electronic Journal of Information Systems Evaluation
电子版ISSN：1566-6379
出版年度：2011
卷号：14
期号：1
页码：13-26
出版社：Academic Conferences Limited
摘要：Hardly a sector of economic activity has remained untouched by the trend of inter‑firm collaboration, particularly among large enterprises, but it seems to remain uncommon among many SMEs especially in some developing countries. The advantages of the SMEs of being faster and flexible are clouded by the lack of resources and skills to develop businesses in the network. Successful development in some economies, mainly in Asia, has been based on effective linkage participation of SMEs as a strategy to cover the scarcities they face. This strategy is now playing an important role on the agenda in many countries in Latin America, but there is still a lack of information to make this strategy more popular among SMEs in these countries. Traditional literature in developed countries has been focused on large companies to explain what makes an alliance successful, how the relationship alliance partners should be, which structure of the alliance or the type of contract may make or break an alliance but, few researches have explored alliance as a strategy to develop SMEs. The critical role of decision‑making process regarding to the choice of being engaging into an alliance deserves particular research attention. This paper is focused on the alliance decision making process with specially emphasis on SMEs. The main contribution is to provide a framework of different factors that have influenced alliance decision making process. Based on Social Capital and Social Exchange, this research concentrates his analysis on a sample of SMEs from Mexico in which both, experienced and inexperienced alliances entrepreneurs, were considered. Our proposal included twelve variables which were analyzed to find their impact on the alliance decision making. The results show that the internal alliance initiative, frequently enterprise diagnose, trust based on partners’ prestige and smaller or similar characteristics of potential partners have strong influence on positive alliance decision making. Opposite expected characteristics were found between alliance experienced entrepreneurs and alliance inexperienced entrepreneurs.
关键词：Alliances ; decision-making ; factors ; process ; SMEs
