Although creating an alliance is demanding, challenging and complicated task, it is still possible to build successful global alliances through competitive collaboration and international management?
You can find several articles on success factors of strategic alliances: http://www.forbes.com/2002/07/18/0719alliance.html , http://iveybusinessjournal.com/topics/strategy/the-five-factors-of-a-strategic-alliance#.UjiIPBzbzIU , http://www.rtleads.com/1/post/2012/08/strategic-alliance-success-factors-if-you-want-to-go-far-go-with-others.html , http://www.alliancestrategy.com/PDFs/BGC%20SuccessSecrets%20Novartis00.pdf ...
Interesting question, thanks for asking it and thanks to Tiia for the references. I find it interesting because I am exploring the factors that lead to successful collaborations with Paul Wyton of Sheffield Business School. We are in the early stages of our project, but see alliances as collaborations that create a new corporate entity, and feel the clarity of purpose, degree of autonomy and levels of equity invested by the founding organisations are amongst the factors to investigate further.