ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 discussed the dramatic growth in the number of new forms of collaborative, inter-firm relationship that have been seen since the beginning of the 1980s. While interfirm agreements are nothing new, this current wave involves a much wider and more flexible range of relationships than has previously existed (Chesnais, 1988), with collaboration occurring for a wide variety of reasons and manifesting itself in a number of forms (Dodgson, 1993). Various theories have been posited in an attempt to account for this trend towards collaboration, and it has been argued that a major cause has been the intensification of external pressures on companies within the contemporary marketplace (Collins and Doorley, 1991). To survive in this environment firms have needed to seek greater efficiency, greater flexibility and a reduction in uncertainty (Mytelka, 1991; Ahern, 1993a; Block and MacMillan, 1993), and collaboration has been viewed by many companies as a way of achieving these objectives and hence improving their ability to compete (Skjerstad, 1994). Alliances formed between large and small companies have the potential to be particularly beneficial to both partners due to the complementary characteristics of such firms, not least in areas of innovation (Hull and Slowinski, 1990; Rothwell, 1993).
