The Strategic Alliance Game: Bringing Alliances to Life

Strategic alliances—voluntary interfirm arrangements involving resource sharing—are critical to firm success. To help strategic management students better understand alliance negotiation and formation, we developed a simple game that places them in a real alliance negotiation situation, involving simultaneous cooperation and competition (i.e., co-opetition), in which they negotiate and potentially build alliances. Teams receive either production or knowledge resources and cooperate and/or compete with each other to build a product. In the process, they understand that partners have different objectives, they analyze available resources, and they evaluate whom to trust. In this article, we describe the game and provide debriefing suggestions