Managing Networks in the Digital Economy: Alliances, Cooperatives, Franchise Chains, Platforms and Digitalization

Usual processes of alliance building, moving from strategy to partner selection, project definition, governance design, and, finally, implementation by the partners, are paced by trust-building and often become too slow to respond to fast and hard-to-fathom digital disruptions. The authors propose an alternative model, where partner selection, alliance design, and trust-building come first, and provide a collaborative incubator for various alliance projects decided upon later. They outline enabling conditions and leadership behaviors, drawn from their research and personal experience, for this model to be effective. They illustrate this around alliances between competitors in telecom services and between multiple unlikely partners in the development of personal mobility solutions.