Institutional public-private partnerships: Mixing oil and water?

Institutional PPPs (henceforth, IPPP), in which public and private organizations cooperate by creating a new organization to be governed by all parties in the alliance, raise significant questions for both scholars and managers. This article focuses on one of the main management difficulties of these alliances: the existing differences between public and private sectors. We reinforce the premise that exploring the existing differences between the public and the private sector should be a priori in building up research on public-private sector alliances performance. After the diagnosis of these differences we analyze how they may affect the management of IPPPs.