Using Strategic Alliances to Facilitate Community Based new Venture Creation

In this essay we explore how strategic alliances (SA) between organizations and communities can be used to develop opportunities that are advantageous for both the corporation and the community venturer. In particular, Indigenous communities have access to significant amounts of natural resources and corporations need access to these. Thus, there is an urgent need to discover the factors that drive the creation of successful corporate/community alliances and how these may be used to create sustainable new ventures that serve both economic and social value creation. To do this we review theory through the lens of three distinct but interrelated perspectives: strategic alliances, entrepreneurship and community. We argue that a sufficient framework for informing corporate/community based ventures has not yet been devised. The article concludes with discussion concerning the potential for the weaving of factors/issues identified in the reviewed literature into a framework that will guide future research.