Strategic alliances in the high-tech industry

Foreword Krzysztof Klincewicz's book is of outstanding interest for business practitioners in the high-tech sector, as well as scholars and policy makers. In recent years, there has been growing pressure on firms to give higher priority to R&D and at the same time to improve their R&D effectiveness. These pressures are associated with the accelerating rate of product innovations, shorter product life-cycles, the growing diversification of the technological portfolio underlying the products and the growing range of applications, functions that a product or a service must provide. For example, a mobile phone, which used to provide only real time voice communication in its early days has additional functionality nowadays to provide including music downloading, Internet access, digital TV and global positioning. We are witnessing transformations of simple products to become complex products. Boundaries between hitherto distinct sectoral segments are becoming blurred as the result of technological change. For management, all this implies that the traditional focus on the management of projects must be extended to include greater emphasis on the strategically more important issue of the management of technology. It is universally known today that information and communication technology (ICT) has now become the dominant technology in the world economy. This field is characterized by its turbulent nature of changes taking place in the market as well as technologies. No firm can realistically hope to exist on its own in isolation. It has to form linkages with its competitors as well as other firms, institutions in the same or different field. At the same time, it has to manage these linkages efficiently and also creatively. This is where Dr Klincewicz has made a significant contribution. 6 Foreword Firstly, the author has been able to analyze accurately the processes of radical change in the high tech industry, characterized by strategic partnerships. He develops an analytical framework to analyze the structure of the high-tech industry, based on the concept of high-tech value chain, which is different from platform leadership. The analytical framework and the ty-pology offers new ways of interpreting a company's own position in the industry and how one can make strategic moves vis-à-vis other players in the value chain, to maximize one's competitiveness. He classifies three types of players in the value chain: value chain leader, complementors and contractors, and then discusses the roles and strategies of each of them. The book offers a comprehensive review of existing literature, concerning …