Research & Development departments, agreements about simultaneous engineering, technology commercialization agreements as well as licensing or joint development agreements. Operations and logistics alliances, where partners either share the costs of implementing new manufacturing or production facilities, or utilize already existing infrastructure in foreign countries owned by a local company. Marketing, sales and service strategic alliances, in which companies take advantage of the existing marketing and distribution infrastructure of another enterprise in a foreign market to distribute its own products to provide easier access to these markets. Multiple activity alliance, which connect several of the described types of alliances. Marketing alliances most often operate as single country alliances, international enterprises use several alliances in each country and technology and development alliances are usually multi-country alliances. These different types and characters can be combined in a multiple activity alliance. Further kinds of strategic alliances include: Cartels: Big companies can cooperate unofficially, to control production and/or prices within a certain market segment or business area and constrain their competition Franchising: a franchiser gives the right to use a brand-name and corporate concept to a franchisee who has to pay a fixed amount of money. The franchiser keeps the control over pricing, marketing and corporate decisions in general. Licensing: A company pays for the right to use another company's technology or production processes. Industry standard groups: These are groups of normally large enterprises, that try to enforce technical standards according to their own production processes. Outsourcing: Production steps that do not belong to the core competencies of a firm are likely to be outsourced, which means that another company is paid to accomplish these tasks. Affiliate marketing: a web-based distribution method where one partner provides the possibility of selling products via its sales channels in exchange of a beforehand defined provision. Historical development of strategic alliances Some analysts may say that strategic alliances are a recent phenomena in our time, in fact collaborations between enterprises are as old as the existence of such enterprises. Examples would be early credit institutions or trade associations like the early Dutch guilds. There have always been strategic alliances, but in the last couple of decades the focus and reasons for strategic alliances has evolved very very quickly: In the 1970s, the focus of strategic alliances was the performance of the product. The partners wanted to attain raw material at the best quality at the lowest price possible, the