Partner Selection Criteria in Strategic Alliances When to Ally with Weak Partners

adopting an evolutionary approach and confront what we believe to be the key question
in terms of partner selection: Should partner selection be based primarily on potential
partners’ resource endowments and secondly on their aspiration levels in terms of using
these in certain ways, or should firms give primary attention to the aspiration levels and
focus on the resource endowments secondly? The resource-base view, implicitly suggests
the former by neglecting the aspiration issue. The reason for this may be that it implicitly
assumes that aspirations are aligned in strategic alliances. Use of resources, according to
original resource-based reasoning, involves internalization and not merely access to an
external partner’s resource base (Barney, 1986). When firms internalize resources, aspira-
tion becomes less important, because a single entity remains. However, access to re-
sources can be accomplished through strategic alliances (Grant & Baden Fuller, 2004),
which preserves separate entities and also different strategic aspirations.

In answering the question, we develop three propositions from which theoretical
implications and testable hypothesis can be derived. Key to the propositions is an evolu-
tionary perspective purporting that it may at times be appropriate for a firm to ally with
weak partners in terms of their resource endowments if its strategic aspirations are
strongly aligned with the interest of the central firm. An interesting implication of our
argument is that when aspirations of allies are aligned, bargaining power arguments loose
importance. Thus, when firms choose to ally with firms, with whom they have common
strategic aspirations, bargaining and opportunism problems should diminish. This is im-
portant as an increasing number of alliances involve links between smaller entrepreneu-
rial firms and larger established firms (Doz, 1988; Miotti et al., 2003).

Generally, our case study supports that resource endowments are neither the sin-
gle nor necessarily the most important criteria for partner selection decision in the
exploratory stage. However, our findings tell little about criteria in the subsequent stages.
Strong firms enter the market in the development stage but little allying takes place. We
may suspect that it potentially is unnecessary to enter alliances in this stage, first, because
coordinated market entrance is no longer required, but also because unstructured techni-
cal dialogue and overlapping problem solving (Clark & Fujimoto, 1991; Monteverde,
1995) is less vital due to the emergence of standards and modular interfaces (Robertson
& Langlois, 1995). In the cases discussed it is difficult to evaluate the “appropriateness”

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