The first is that company alliance networks can be used to facilitate strategic change inside a company. This role of alliance networks has, so far, been relatively neglected in the alliances literature. We show that strategic renewal is not just limited to an internal project. The case of IBM shows that strate- gic repositioning can be facilitated by an active use of the company network. Different strategies require dif- ferent types of networks. Learning strategies aiming at exploitation require different alliances and alliance part- ners than learning strategies aimed at exploration. To be successful, new company innovation strategies need to
be translated into new networks (De Man, 2004). We have shown that it is not the number of alliances which matters but the nature of the alliance network which is most important. In fact, management attention and inte- gration costs may grow exponentially beyond a certain level of alliances (Duysters and De Man, 2003). In other words, a firm can start to suffer from information over- load and diseconomies of scale once it is involved in too many alliances at the same time. IBM did well in that respect because it focused on changing the nature of its alliance networks and did not focus on expand- ing the number of alliances as a goal in itself. This paper, therefore, strongly suggests that the traditional view of large firms as inert organizations that are unable to adapt swiftly to changing environmental conditions as described in organizational ecology, evolutionary eco- nomic theory and in resource based theories is no longer a valid perspective, given the opportunities that alliance networks create for companies to reposition themselves in the market.