The contributing factors for selecting partners in bilateral non-equity technological alliances in the Brazilian chemical sector / Os fatores condicionantes da seleção de parceiros nos projetos de alianças estratégicas tecnológicas bilaterais sem participação acionária em empresas industriais do setor químico brasileiro

Marcos Paixão Garcez

Although the strategic alliances are one of the strategic alternatives known since the 1970s, it was only twenty years later that finally started the rapid growth of this kind of cooperation, its scope and its coexistence with other organizational forms (HARBISO8 and PEKAR, 1998). At the present time, as projects complexity increases and products and services development term reduces, companies do not detain by themselves all the necessary competences for their survival and growth. Thus, companies nowadays are required to build more extensively external cooperation agreements with other companies, universities and external agents, aiming for: (i) sharing investments and risks; (ii) accelerating project developments, and (iii) accessing resources and competences not available internally, as suggested by the Open Innovation paradigm. Despite the relatively wide literature concerning strategic alliances, structured knowledge in this area can be considered incipient and it encompasses only few studies dealing with one crucial step of the process, the partner selection. Moreover, besides the fact that these few studies do not address a detailed breakdown structure regarding different typologies of partners, they only investigate the phenomena through the firm level perspective instead of the project level perspective. These aspects are considered the main theoretical gaps to be filled in the present study. Thus, this study addresses partner selection stage in non-equity bilateral technological alliances projects, from the point of view of the parent company, taking into account several factors, such as the kind of resources searched, the expected results, the kind of competences searched, the level of projects investments, the time for completion, the risks involved, the previous experience in alliances, the trust between partners, the convergence level of expected objectives and the level of organizational cultural similarities, depending on the type of the partner and the type of projects. The empirical data come from two successive stages, a qualitative and other quantitative. In the qualitative stage, it was carried out one case study in the biggest Brazilian petrochemical company, where were analyzed in-depth twenty alliances projects performed with different types of partners competitors, customers, suppliers, universities and technological institutes, and different types of projects incremental (derivative), platforms, breakthrough (radical) and basic science. Based on the resource based view and the knowledge based view theories, jointly with the empirical data that have emerged from the case studies, it was possible to identify certain specific domains for the types of alliances, along the exploitationexploration continuum. These preliminary evidences have enabled the building of several hypotheses that were tested in the quantitative research performed within the Brazilian chemical sector. The quantitative study points out one wide array of relations, determining the more contributing selection factors in each situation, and the ranking of this contribution regarding the type of partner and type of project. The study aims to bring reflections, theoretical and practical contributions on this relevant subject, in order to establish basic relationships that could lead to a better understanding of the contributing factors for selecting partners in technological alliances.

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