This is a Chinese version of Competitive Strategy. You can find the original course in English from our course catalog. 此版本是Coursera首次尝试推出的中文翻译版。课程视频为英文原版附中文字幕，课程页面和测验已译成中文，帮助中心提供中文支持。 在本课程（共六个模块）中，你将了解企业在战略决策相互依存的情况下如何行事。例如，你的行动会如何影响竞争对手的利润，反之亦然。我们将会借助博弈论的基本工具分析企业如何选择策略以获得竞争优势。
战略合作伙伴关系 Strategic Partnerships
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From the course by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU)
竞争策略（中文版）
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From the lesson
互补产品和战略合作伙伴关系 Complementary Products and Strategic Partnerships
在本模块中，我们将介绍互补产品的概念，并运用经济学术语来探讨它们的意义。我们将研究企业为何想要将产品捆绑出售，以及互补性如何产生转换成本。我们还将讨论企业间的协调对互补产品的重要性。最后，我们将学习战略合作伙伴关系作为一强大工具如何在特定环境下为企业带来利益。
Meet the Instructors
Tobias KretschmerProfessor
Institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization
So thanks very much for staying on. In this very last video lecture for
today, we're going to be looking at strategic partnerships and how they can
foster coordination between firms that produce complementary products.
We're also going to look at the form that these strategic partnerships are most
likely to take for complementary products producers.
So what's special about complementary products producers?
Well they pretty much depend on each other anyway.
Right? So, as we've seen in the previous videos
it's good if I can work with someone who's producing complementary
products. I profit from the fact that he produces high
quality or produces at a low price, or produces a large variety of my
complementary product. So, we're always, already, depending on
each other. So, helping each other, coordinating each
other's behavior, somehow comes naturally and it maximizes the postive effects of
complementarity. We also saw that it may be desirable to
integrate into one firm because that aligns interests even more.
But sometimes integrating into this one single company is just not feasible or
not desired by the involved firms. So, if you think of two massive
conglomerates that may have complementary interests in a particular segment, it's
unlikely that this is going to make them merge.
But, on the other hand it's clear that
they do have complimentary interests in this particular segment of the market.
So, an alternative to integrating and to forming a single company is to form a
strategic partnership, which is, generally speaking, a powerful way of
institutionalizing coordination and of formalizing interests.
And strategic partnerships, of course, in the very broadest sense are relationships
between firms, they're long term relationships between firms, with a
number of characteristics that are typical to strategic partnerships.
First of all, there's an element of shared decision making, right?
So if we produce complements, then maybe product introduction decisions or
quality decisions or pricing decisions will be made somehow in a shared way.
We also try to achieve some kind of organizational linkage and we try to
implement coordination mechanisms. This is what we call organisational
integration. We also often have joint equity
ownership. We don't have to have it.
But joint equity ownership is often a form of building a strategic partnership.
This is what we call economic integration.
And so how do these two features, organizational integration and economic
integration, pan out? What do they involve?
So, think of these two firms A and B. They have organizational units
represented by the green rectangles. What does organizational integration
involve? It involves forming teams across firms.
So maybe some employees of firm A and firm B in these units will work on a
team together. There's often some established reporting
and decision routines across firms. So, the exchange of information is
formalized, it's usually very heavy. So, there's a lot of exchange of
information in both ways and bi-directionally.
So it's important that organizational integration relies very much on the
exchange of information, and on the routinized exchange of information
through teams, through reporting, through decision rules, or generally speaking,
through a lot of interaction. Okay?
Note that, however, organizational integration does not depend on the fact
that I have shared asset ownership. So what does economic integration mean,
then? It means direct cross ownership of
equity. So this would mean that firm A holds x
percent of firm B's assets, and vice versa, firm B may hold y percent of firm
A's assets. It might also mean that economic
integration takes the form of setting up a new legal entity in the form of a joint
venture which is owned to some part by firm A, and to some part by firm B.
And clearly there are benefits to that. You align the interests, right?
So if you have joint asset ownership, you want the other firm to do well,
because that means that your share of the other firm is going to do well, as well.
You retain some control and exclusivity. So if you own firm B, if you own a part
of firm B, it's unlikely that firm B is just going to turn around and start
dealing with your closest competitor. So, that's retaining control, retaining
exclusivity as well. And finally it makes inter-organisational
coordination, so the whole issue of organisational
integration that we discussed just now, easier, right?
So sometimes, reporting structures are greased or made easier by the fact that
you have joint asset ownership, for example.
Now, how does complementarity play into this situation?
Well, as we've seen, and as we've discussed, if firms produce complementary
products already, they already have high incentives to work together in a
cooperative way. That's what a lot of today's lecture
basically was about. So we would expect that there's probably
less need for economic intergration to align those interests because they are fairly
well aligned already. So in other words, if our products are
highly complementary, then we would perceive less of a need for economic
integration. So as we've seen just now, companies that
produce complementary products will gain from coordinating their behavior with
each other. And the best way to achieve this is to
integrate both companies into a single organization. But sometimes this is not
possible.
So this could be for several reasons: a desire for independence, only a small
part that is complementary between two firms and so on.
So as an alternative, firms will often consider forming a strategic
partnership. And a strategic partnership is
characterized by some degree of shared decision making, by creating and
maintaining organizational linkages and possibly holding joint
equity. So, the general idea of joint equity
ownership is often to align, is mostly to align, the interests of firms and make the
strategic partnership work effectively. In our special case of two new firms
producing complements, these firms already have a strong incentive to work
together closely. Why?
Because their products are complements, so if you do well, I do well.
Alright? So this is not necessarily dependent on
joint ownership. So we focused on complements this week.
So we'll summarize what we've learned today in the following wrap-up video,
and in the end of the week quiz. Thanks very much, and I'll see you at the wrap-up.
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