Alliance Lab: Trust, Control & Co-Development

A Level-4 strategic-alliance simulation set at Helbion Systems GmbH, a Munich-based EUR 380m industrial sensor and controls firm with a deeply control-heavy, build-it-all-ourselves engineering culture — scar tissue from an IP leak a decade ago. With the embedded-AI race accelerating, the board approves a fixed EUR 12,000,000 innovation budget and gives the R&D manager two weeks to structure Helbion's first serious co-development alliance with Cortexa AI SAS, a fast-moving Toulouse edge-AI firm a rival (Sentek) is also courting. Over four rounds you act as the alliance lead: (1) diagnose mutual dependence and set an initial trust-vs-control posture on a 0–100 dial; (2) design the governance architecture — how much core IP to expose across four tiers (interfaces only → open the core sensing models), how much budget to spend on control machinery (audits, escrow, monitoring), and how tightly to bound the IP terms (field-of-use, background/foreground split, joint-ownership rules); (3) respond to a midpoint defection — Cortexa unilaterally files a patent on a jointly-developed method, the facts genuinely ambiguous — on a spectrum from escalate/litigate/clamp-down to clarify/repair/recommit; and (4) recover the alliance and defend its ROI to a skeptical board tempted to revert to building internally. The engine operationalizes Francis Bidault's research that trust and control are not simple substitutes: the goal is the configuration that MAXIMIZES joint creativity given the risks, not minimum risk. Wrong strategies underperform on purpose — maximum control builds a safe, pointless alliance whose creativity gauge is as low as its IP-risk gauge; opening the core IP with no field-of-use limits or foreground/background split is recklessness once Cortexa can walk to Sentek; over-lawyering burns the budget that should fund engineering; clamping down on an ambiguous defection over a governance gap you yourself left blows up a salvageable alliance; capitulating signals your IP terms are unenforceable; and deliberating endlessly lets Sentek sign Cortexa to an exclusive. Track Joint Creativity Output, Trust Level, IP Risk, Alliance ROI, budget consumed by control machinery (out of EUR 12m), and the competitive clock. Teaches Bidault's trust-control-creativity model, background vs. foreground IP, relational vs. contractual governance, the real-options view of alliances, and make-vs-ally-vs-buy.