How organisations work together
Wave2 Alliances is a reference on how organisations work together without merging. It explains the vocabulary people use when they talk about alliances, sets out the main relationship shapes, and describes how terms and governance are usually put together in practice.
The material is written for the person who has just been handed a partnership to run, or who is about to agree one and would like to know what the ordinary difficulties are before meeting them. It assumes no prior familiarity with the subject and no particular industry.
It is also, deliberately, honest about failure. Partnerships fail more often than they succeed, usually for a small number of recurring structural reasons rather than for want of goodwill. Those reasons are described here plainly, because recognising them early is the only cheap way to avoid them.
The reading room
Reading tracks
Start here
- What an alliance isThe working definition
- GlossaryTwenty-four terms in plain words
Relationship shapes
- Forms of partnershipFive shapes side by side
- Channel and reseller relationshipsSelling through other people
- Joint ventures and consortiaWhen a separate vehicle helps
- Co-marketing and joint promotionCheapest and most fragile
Making them work
- How alliance terms are structuredThe usual clause families
- Governance and day-to-day managementWho runs it after signing
- Measuring a partnershipBeyond counting meetings
- Why partnerships failThe recurring patterns
Background
- History of working togetherGuilds to modern ventures
- Platform ecosystemsWhen one party owns the surface
Where alliances show up
- DistributionOne party has a product, the other has an established route to buyers. What is exchanged is reach in return for margin.
- Manufacturing capacityOne party owns a plant with spare capacity, the other owns demand it cannot serve. What is exchanged is throughput for utilisation.
- Research and developmentTwo parties hold complementary technical knowledge and share the cost and the risk of a result neither is sure of.
- Standards workSeveral parties agree a shared technical basis so that each can sell into a larger market than any of them could create alone.
- Public infrastructureA public body holds the mandate and the site; private parties hold the construction and operating skill. The exchange runs over decades.
- Professional referralTwo practices serve the same clients on different problems and pass work to each other rather than turning it away.
- Software integrationTwo products are more useful connected than separate, so each party builds and maintains part of the join.
- Trade bodiesCompetitors fund a shared organisation to do work none of them can do alone: training, representation, common terminology.
Recent additions and working definitions
Recent additions
- Platform ecosystemsBackground — In a platform ecosystem the parties are not negotiating with each other so much as accepting terms set by whoever owns the surface.
- Measuring a partnershipMaking them work — Activity is the easiest thing to count and the least informative.
- Co-marketing and joint promotionForms of partnership — Joint promotion is the cheapest partnership to start and the easiest to abandon.
- How alliance terms are structuredMaking them work — This page describes the shape of documents that people who work on alliances expect to see.
Working definitions
- Alliance
- A continuing arrangement in which two or more organisations coordinate work towards an agreed outcome while remaining separately owned and separately run.
- Channel conflict
- The friction that arises when a producer sells both through a partner and directly to the same buyers, so the partner is competing with its own supplier.
- Joint venture
- An arrangement in which the parties create a separate vehicle, contribute resources to it, and share what it produces according to agreed proportions.
- Co-marketing
- Joint promotion of separately owned offerings, usually with shared costs and shared audiences but no shared product.
Sections of this site
Each section is a standalone explanation. Nothing here assumes you have read the pages before it.