Alliance Excellence Award Categories

Alliance for Corporate Social Responsibility

Alliances that have made a profound, measurable, and positive social impact. The principal objective of the alliance should be social impact, not profit—although profit, especially if used to fund program expansion, is not discouraged. Click here to download a nomination form.

Alliance Program Excellence

Organizations that have instilled the capability to consistently implement and manage alliance portfolios and demonstrated consistent success of those alliances over time. Winners will have programs built on an integrated suite of processes, tools, professional development/alliance professional certification, and other elements. Click here to download a nomination form.

Individual Alliance Excellence

Excellence in managing a single alliance in any phase of the alliance life cycle, including but not limited to: planning, partnering, building the governance for, implementing, executing, exiting, or transforming the alliance. The proposal should focus on the results of a single alliance. This alliance may be between two companies or multiple organizations. Click here to download a nomination form.

Typically the Awards Committee will select Individual Alliance Excellence winners from the following subcategories:

Small and Mid-sized Company Alliance
Well-positioned and executed alliances by companies with less than $500 million in revenues. This category recognizes the smaller companies that have developed high-impact alliances without the resources commonly at the disposal of very large organizations.

Emerging Alliance
Relatively new (typically one to two years) alliances that have already impacted corporate value and performance, yet do not have the track record of a long-established alliance.

Longstanding Alliance
Partnerships that have sustained excellence over the course of five or more years. Typically these alliances will have overcome one or more challenges in which each partner had to adapt to evolving conditions.

Innovative Best Alliance Practice

New individual alliance management tools or processes that have made an immediate and powerful impact on the organization and/or the discipline of alliance management. These can relate to any phase of the alliance life cycle: from setting strategy to exiting or transforming the alliance. These tools or processes are not comprehensive alliance programs, but rather practices that address specific elements of alliance management (e.g., metrics, training, conflict resolution, approaches to communication). A recent winner, HP, developed its RIPE metric to better capture the quality of alliance sales engagements. Click here to download a nomination form.

Best Ecosystem Solution 

This award recognizes a group of at least four partners that jointly deliver an innovative solution for a specific client/customer or set of clients/customers. The focus is on the level of the solution the partners offer jointly. Submissions in this category should specifically highlight how their management of the ecosystem differs from the management of bilateral alliances, how they cope with the dynamics of ecosystems and why building an ecosystem was necessary to deliver a unique solution. Click here to download a nomination form.