Driving Growth Through Strategic Partnerships

Today's leaders face continued pressure to sustain competitive advantage while also pursuing new initiatives. Options for growth have always included innovation, consolidation, and geographical expansion, or diversifying into new businesses. However, with disruptive shifts in the external and competitive environment, the growth of technology-based industries, the rise of activist investors, and the blurring of industry boundaries, companies need to increasingly look at strategic partnerships as their primary growth mode.

Those partnerships, however, are easier said than created. Many fail to achieve the desired growth objectives, even destroying value instead of creating it. In Driving Growth through Strategic Partnerships, participants will learn how to enhance their capabilities for both identifying the best partnering opportunities and designing and managing them in ways that create maximum value for all partners.

Program Highlights & Benefits

In Driving Growth through Strategic Partnerships, you will learn how to:

• Analyze the strategic, organizational, and cultural fit among partners
• Compete and cooperate with partners simultaneously
• Become a more effective negotiator
• Resolve business conflicts and manage the evolution of alliances more effectively
• Build on your collaborative capabilities and corporate-level strategies to position your firm as a preferred alliance partner
• Understand how to manage alliance ecosystems effectively
• This program complements Mergers and Acquisitions, which focuses on valuation and legal issues that arise in a strategic alliance.

Experience & Impact

Driving Growth through Strategic Partnerships teaches research-based techniques for designing and forming alliances, showing you how to apply them to your firm’s real-world challenges and experiences. Through case studies, experiential learning, advice from industry experts, and interactive exercises, you will discover a better way to respond to new market opportunities, facilitate time to market, find complementary resources, and gain new skills and technologies through partnerships.

This program will help you build your firm’s alliance capability, making you an alliance “partner of choice.” You will learn how to identify and offset your company’s unique liabilities, develop a reputation for reliability and trustworthiness, and find ways to add value to an alliance. You will also discover how to determine when to enter into a partnership and — equally as important — when to leave one. Conflicts and the evolution of alliances, as well as managing networks of alliances and understanding how they affect overall corporate strategies, are also explored.

Session topics include:

• Growth Strategy and the Role of Partnerships and Ecosystems
• Creating Competitive Advantage
• Alliance Structure and Dynamics
• Strategy and the Role of Alliances
• Negotiating a Partnership (Lecture and Exercises)
• Leveraging Innovation Ecosystems
• Corporate Strategy and Acquisitions