This study explores the critical success factors as perceived by the top executives in the information industries in Taiwan and exam-ines the extent of adoption of strategic alliances in reinforcing or compensating for their strengths or weaknesses in their competitive capability in the world markets. Six major dimensions of critical success factors were identified: marketing and product innovation ca-pability, design and process innovation capability, mass production capability, completeness of product line, service support capability, and manufacturing cost efficiency. Firms tends to adopt different alliance strategies to achieve bet-ter "fits" between their strategic postures and capabilities. Firms with wider gaps in cost efficiency or product line complete- ness tend to participate in R&D alliances, while firms with wider gaps in mass production, product line completeness, and service support capability tend to participate in joint purchasing alliances to maintain sound logistic system in attempt to maintain competitive price level and on-time delivery.
