| Contractual strategic alliance has prominent characters such as flexible boundary, loose relationship, high efficient operation,low requirement on investment, and less government restriction. General contractual strategic alliance has become a popular form of cooperation among small and medium enterprises including collaborative research and development, collaborative marketing strategies. However, contemporary research demonstrates that alliances across different nations and industries have extremely volatile fashion in cooperation and high failure rate. Due to the nature of this type of cooperation, contract lacks the strengths to manage all the contributing parties and this flaw causes contractual strategic alliance many obstruent issues.The stability of contractual strategic alliance is not determined by one singular factor, but a systematic and dynamic problem. This paper, based on biological nature of enterprises, treated contractual strategic alliance as a system and analyze the issues of stability from ecology and system theory’s perspective. The author carefully analyzed the foundation of enterprises’ biological characters and built enterprises’ biological model and contractual strategic alliance biological model;Based on the theoretical analysis of the stability and instability of strategic alliance, the author offered objective and subjective definition of strategic alliance’s stability and instability and then based on ecological theory and analysis the of stability and instability of contractual strategic alliance pertaining to all the contributing factors in the ecosystem of contractual strategic alliance,the author applied system dynamics vensimto for simulation using biological theory to define the of stability and instability of contractual strategic alliance.The main innovations are described as the follows:(1)Built a contractual strategic alliance ecosystem model;On the basis of an analogy with the natural biological, the ecosystem model of enterprise was built. In the enterprise ecosystem perspective, contractual strategic alliances can be established by any enterprises from the enterprise ecosystem, which is a subsystem of the enterprise ecosystem. From viewpoint of system components, the paper constructs the ecosystem model of contractual strategic alliances analyzing its system elements, structure and environment.(2) Explained the stability and instability of contractual strategic alliance based on ecosystem’s perspective;In order to expand their niche, expand its optimum living space, companies develop themselves through the formation of strategic alliances. If optimum living space through the alliance does not get extended, the companies are not satisfied with the performance of the alliance, while the alliance is instable. On the contrary, if optimum living space through the alliance does get extended, on the one hand the alliance partners would fight each other for the extended virtual niche, on the other hand for the would protect their own non-cooperative dimension niche, so this balance between offensive and defensive cause alliance instability.(3) Analyzed the mechanism of the stability of contractual strategic alliance based on system dynamics;Contractual strategic alliance performance, the gap between contractual strategic alliance performance, together with the control of coalition forces target constitute a negative feedback loop causality, in which alliance performance determines the coalition stability. The inherent growth rate based on the main subject of the alliance, the features that represents the alliance’s characters, presents the structure of alliance through competing. Intrinsic growth rate, block rate, competing with the alliance performance, the performance gap between the target and control together constitute a more complex feedback loop. Main subject and structure interacts through this feedback loop, influence alliance performance, and ultimately affect the stability of the alliance. Ecosystem evolution model of contractual strategic alliance is constructed in view of the Lotka-Volterra model in Ecology to analyze the influence of the anlliance ecosystem’s main body and structure on alliance’s stability. |
