Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 58%, University of Lincoln (Faculty of Business & Law), course: International Marketing Strategy, language: English, abstract: [...] There are many different types of partnerships like joint ventures, consortia, licensing, networks and strategic alliances. For a detailed analysis this work concentrates on strategic alliances. To give an insight on the topic this work analyses the alliences between the car manufacturers Nissan and Renault and Renault and Volvo. These partnerships are examples of alliance’s success and failure. On the basis of these examples this work illustrates the sources of alliance formation and how alliances are able to create competive advantage but also the reasons why so many alliances fail. Before the case studies of the above mentioned companies will be discussed this work explains the sources of alliance formation on a theoretical basis.