Bridging disciplines in alliances and networks: in search for solutions for the managerial relevance gap

Suppose you are an alliance manager and you want to set up or manage an alliance. Or you are an alliance consultant who advises network partners to make their relationship run more smoothly. Then, you would appreciate to find valuable advice in the literature of cooperation. However, in studying the contemporary academic literature, we concluded that it offers at best only piecemeal advice on the process of cooperation. No integrative framework was found that could provide coherence and guidance on the various stages of cooperation. This paper attempts to develop such a framework, building upon relevant streams and articles in literature. We developed five lenses to look at cooperation and used two cases (The Healthy Region and the Senseo Alliance) to illustrate how these five lenses can work.