Collaborative Strategies: New Thinking about Alliances, Mergers, and Acquisitions

Inter-firm alliances, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) represent important means of how firms grow, compete, and accumulate resources and capabilities. The SMS Special Conference in Costa Rica intends to share new insights on this topic from the application of novel advances in theory, methods, and context now available to strategy scholars. At the macro level, as the emerging economies continue to provide ever increasing proportion of alliances and M&As, we need to further develop an understanding of the role of institutional and economic context in this collaborative strategies. At the inter-firm level, it has long been acknowledged that incentives incompatibility and information asymmetry open the door to strategic interaction among firms, yet these dynamics continue to be understudied phenomena. At the intra-firm level, we need to develop a better understanding of the actual processes, activities and structures that underlie successful implementation of alliances and M&As. We encourage scholars to share their novel perspectives in this conference in the beautiful Costa Rica.