– Mutual service consortium – the weakest and most distant form of an alliance– is a partnership of similar companies in similar industries to pooltheir resources in order to gain a benefit that is too expensive to develop
alone, such as access to advanced technology, e.g. combined computerchip development by Siemens, IBM and Toshiba some years ago. The mutualservice consortium is fairly weak and distant; there is very little interaction
and communication between the alliance partners.