Abstract: In the context of industrial boundaries gradually becoming blurred, to form cross-industry alliance is an effective way for enterprises to complement each other’s advantages, share their resources, save their costs, improve their performance, and achieve their innovative development. The researches on the cross-industry alliance abroad started from the beginning of the 21st century, while the domestic related researches started very late. This paper first reviews the research literatures on cross-industry alliance both at home and abroad in recent ten years, then it induces and analyzes them according to such aspects as the concept connotation, cause of formation, partner selection, governance, and the multiple effect of the cross-industry alliance. After finding out the shortages of the existing researches, this paper studies the problems and puts forward the related policy suggestions for the future researches, such as how to improve and expand the connotation of the cross-industry alliance, how to construct the multi-dimensional distance measurement method, and how to find out the factors affecting the performance of the cross-industry alliance, etc..

Key words: cross-industry alliance; cross-industry collaboration; research status and outlook