Abstract This paper extends entrepreneurship into the domain of alliances, and investigates the effect of alliance proactiveness on market‐based firm performance (defined in terms of sales growth, market share, market development and product development). Alliance proactiveness is defined as the extent to which an organization engages in identifying and responding to partnering opportunities. The effect of alliance proactiveness on performance is tested within a contingency framework, with size and perceived environmental uncertainty as moderators, and using data from 182 firms. We estimated the model using partial least squares. Results indicate that alliance proactiveness leads to superior market‐based performance, and that this effect is stronger for small firms and in unstable market environments. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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