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.
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PROPOSALS
Inter-firm alliances, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) represent important means of how firms grow, compete in markets and accumulate important resources and capabilities. Research in Strategic Management in the last couple of decades on these phenomena has studied, both theoretically and empirically, questions related to (i) under what conditions firms are likely to use alliances or M&A, as well as (ii) under what conditions are they likely to be successful. Consequently, as researchers, we have now accumulated a significant body of insightful knowledge on these phenomenon based on a variety of theoretical perspectives and empirical approaches.
Yet, there are many unaddressed and unanswered questions at many different levels of analysis including the role of the national context or industry structure, strategic interaction among firms, inter-firm resource redeployment and other strategies for value creation, and intra-firm structures people, and processes. And new advances in theory and methods now available to researchers in Strategic Management open the door to providing better answers to such unaddressed and unanswered questions. The goal of this conference is to provide a forum to share insights from the application of novel approaches in terms of theory, methods or context to achieve better understanding of these phenomena.
The conference will be held in Costa Rica, a beautiful, hospitable and unique country. It is a sanctuary of ecotourism with an incredibly high bio-diversity. Most importantly, it is home to some of the happiest people in the world! During the conference, you will have the opportunity to visit a coffee plantation and taste some of the most refined coffees in the world. Before or after the conference, we hope that you will have the chance to visit Costa Rica’s active volcanoes and tropical rain forest, to spot for toucans, sloths and other exotic animals, to relax at thermal waters, and to enjoy the beaches of the Caribbean and Pacific coasts.