The increasing competition in recent years made more and more firms regard strategic alliance as an important alternative and solution to respond to fierce competition. As a kind of system arrangement among firms, the concept of strategic alliance was first proposed by Hopland and Nigel in the early 1980s, who defined strategic alliance as the collaboration mode in which two or more firms, aiming at joint-owned both market and resources, formed the kind of cooperation to enhance advantages, share risk or cost, and also mutual flow of production factors via different kinds of contracts or agreement. However, even before this definition, many firms have already begun their alliance strategies practices.
As a cooperative form, strategic alliance, no matter its specific types, becomes one key choice for firms to acquire, maintain and enhance their market shares and positions. Shrader (2001) found that collaboration to foreign firms become key methods for newly-founded firms and small firms to enter foreign markets, which can bring these firms with suitable knowledge and market information, making these firms expand even faster with lower costs and market risks. The enhancing pace of globalization and internationalization triggered firms’ attentions to external markets, Archibugi and Iammarino (2002) found that fierce changes in internal market forced firms to expand their market and product scopes, making more and more firms realize product and R&D internationalization by searching, choosing and collaborating with foreign firms. Dong and Glaister (2006) found Chinese firms cared more about market positions, international expansion and technology exchanges, while foreign firms tended to enter to Chinese market and learn how to operate in China via strategic alliances.
Although, many scholars brought out managerial practices of firms’ strategic alliances, and had already formed theoretical foundations, researches related to market orientation, especially how alliance firms establish and realize their strategic goals and performance goals under market motivation is still lack of studies. In reality, the mechanism how firms’ alliance intention transformed into their strategic or performance goals is still in the black box. Taken alliance firms as research objectives, this paper tends to explore how firms constructed strategic alliance due to market-orientation realize their strategic or performance goals via choice of patent strategies. We introduced patent strategies to establish the matching model, to analyze how firms market orientation influence choices of patent strategies, and their mutual effects on firms innovative performance, in hope to provide to the future studies and managerial practice how firms can choose the reasonable and effective alliance partners according to their own strategic and performance goals. Based on differentiation of market access and market extension motivation, we pointed out that, in order to realize the transformation from alliance motivation to innovation performance, alliance firms had to choose and determine among a set of practical and operational plans. Patent strategies, as a kind of operational plan, were conducive to transformation from alliance motivation to innovation performance. With the framework of market motivation, patent strategy and firms innovative performance, we put forward the hypotheses on how market motivation affect firms’ choices of patent strategies, and also the joint effects of market motivation and patent strategies on firm innovative performance. We selected alliance firms in IT industry as samples, with data from Cooperative Agreements and Technology Indicators Database, USPTO and R&D Scoreboard released by Department for Business, Innovation & Skills of UK, we empirically tested effects of market motivation on choices of patent strategies, and also effects of market motivation and patent strategies on firms innovative performance.
Results showed that: different market positions led to differentiated motivations and patent strategies in their strategic alliances, firms with relatively weak market positions tend to pursue strategic profile of patent defensive and leveraging strategies under market access motivation, while firms with strong positions would like to implement patent proprietary and leveraging strategies in market extension motivation. The implementation of patent defensive and leveraging strategies under market access motivation enhanced innovation efficiency of the firms with weak market positions. Since these firms focused more on market positions and opportunities, their market capitalization tended to improve, but the motivation and utilization of patent strategies had no effect on patent output. Similar to these firms, the ones with stronger market position were inclined to strengthen their market opportunities and improve their market capitalization. Results indicated that because of their stronger market positions, these firms showed lower awareness of innovation efficiency and their emphasis on patent output was not high either, which then led to the fact that both market extension motivation and patent strategies used had no effects on firms innovative performance measured by innovation efficiency or patent output.

• Binbin Jiang(Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China)
• Honglei Liu(Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China)
• C. Anthony Di Benedetto(Temple University, USA)
• Gang Song(Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China)