Diagnosing Failure in an Organizational Strategic Alliance for New Product Development

The objective of the present study is to derive the lessons learned from an unsuccessful strategic alliance for new product development involving a Brazilian company and an international company. Organizational strategic alliances for new product development represent an alternative to the construction of competencies. This inter‐organizational cooperation for complementing competencies has generated a learning process between the involved companies, thus enhancing innovation and competitiveness. The Soft Systems Methodology is suitable to address such subject given its learning feature, which is appropriate for exploring the soft problems inherent to alliances. In addition, the use of the Viable Systems Model seems to be appropriate as well, given its ability to cope with the complexity of the problem situation and diagnose the causes of eventual failure. It became clear that the application of these methodologies enabled the authors to organize the issues related to the problem situation, facilitate learning and derive recommendations regarding what could have been done to prevent failure. Such recommendations are expected to be useful in future similar situations.