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Abstract

Strategic alliances—voluntary interfirm arrangements involving resource sharing—are critical to firm success. To help strategic management students better understand alliance negotiation and formation, we developed a simple game that places them in a real alliance negotiation situation, involving simultaneous cooperation and competition (i.e., co-opetition), in which they negotiate and potentially build alliances. Teams receive either production or knowledge resources and cooperate and/or compete with each other to build a product. In the process, they understand that partners have different objectives, they analyze available resources, and they evaluate whom to trust. In this article, we describe the game and provide debriefing suggestions.

Keywords

strategic alliance formation game negotiation trust relationship building

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The Strategic Alliance Game: Bringing Alliances to Life

Abstract

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