Alliance manager

An alliance manager is the person who runs a partnership between organizations day to day, keeping the partners aligned, tracking commitments on both sides and raising problems early.

How it's used in a university-industry collaboration

Kale and Singh (Academy of Management Perspectives, 2009) report that firms with a dedicated alliance function succeed about 70% of the time, against about 40% without one. The function is the institutional form that develops and manages governance processes specific to their organization, the manager is the person responsible for the partner relationships.

In an R&D project the job is concrete: keep the governance charter current, run the status reports, hold the escalation clock, prepare the steering committee's gate reviews and watch the publication and IP clocks. The hiring test is credibility in the lab meeting and in the budget review.

Where this comes from

The definition builds on Kale and Singh's account of the dedicated alliance function (2009, https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2009.43479263).

What Helikon does with it

On our platform, an alliance manager can hold the admin role on their projects, invite partners by email as editors, collaborators or viewers, and track each project's contracts and analytics.