Classification and use of resources sought through alliances in global virtual industrial enterprises

In an increasingly globalised world, strategic alliances are becoming an extremely important aspect of becoming competitive. A virtual enterprise (VE) can be defined as a company which can optimise its alliance operations. Thus alliance decision making becomes a critical stage for a VE. It is not unusual that an organisation, after years of poor performing internal operation, finally realises that alliance should have been used from the very beginning. Therefore, how to make a good judgement of whether to externalise or internalise a task becomes crucial from both aspects of time and efficiency. One of the most important issues in any alliance is the resources brought in by individual partners. In a manufacturing context, many different types of resources are involved. Resourcecombination effectiveness, management complexity and flexibility are identified as the three factors providing fundamental explanations of an organisation's alliance decisions. Based on a review of existing alliances and partnerships, this paper classifies resources into 10 categories which are usually sought by manufacturing companies through forming alliances with external parties. This classification aims to give companies a quick reference during alliance resource configuration. The paper further defines resource according to the characteristics summarised from the 10 categories, which establishes a foundation for resource-based theories in the research areas like business alliance and virtual enterprise.