300 Int. J. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, Vol. 20, Nos. 5/6, 2016 Copyright © 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Instabilities in international joint ventures: a study of the Tata DoCoMo case Utpal Chattopadhyay* and Pragya Bhawsar National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Vihar Lake, Mumbai-400087, India Email: utuchat@gmail.com Email: pragyabhawsar.ib@gmail.com *Corresponding author Abstract: The stupendous growth in India’s mobile telephony industry has attracted many foreign operators to invest in India. Japan’s telecom giant NTT DoCoMo entered into Indian market through an equity joint venture (JV) with Tata Teleservices, the telecommunication arm of India’s biggest business conglomerate, Tata Sons. The Tata DoCoMo joint venture started with a great fanfare by introducing an innovative ‘one paisa per second’ billing model. But after notable success in the initial years, the venture plunged into a phase of perpetual instabilities when NTT DoCoMo unilaterally desired to exit from the venture by offloading its entire 26% stake to the Indian partner. This paper is an attempt to look afresh into the causes of JV instabilities and to probe, in depth, why the Tata DoCoMo venture has run into rough weather, that too in a period when the telecom industry in India had progressed tremendously in all business dimensions. Keywords: strategic alliance; international joint venture; IJV; telecom industry; instabilities; innovation; business performance; strategy. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Chattopadhyay, U. and Bhawsar, P. (2016) ‘Instabilities in international joint ventures: a study of the Tata DoCoMo case’, Int. J. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, Vol. 20, Nos. 5/6, pp.300–319. Biographical notes: Utpal Chattopadhyay is currently working as an Associate Professor, Economics and Strategy Area at the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Mumbai, India. Earlier, he had worked for more than a decade in management training and consultancy domain with the National Productivity Council of India (NPC). He also had a short stint of working in a research project at the Indian School of Mines (ISM), Dhanbad. He holds a PhD degree in Economics from the Delhi University and MSc in Economics from the Calcutta University. His teaching and research interests include areas like managerial economics, economic environment of business, global competitiveness and international trade issues. He has to his credit more than 30 research papers either published in peer-reviewed journals and/or presented in various international conferences held in India and abroad. Pragya Bhawsar is a Research Scholar with the National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai, India. She is an instrumentation engineer and holds an MBA in International Business. Her research interest includes competitiveness, industrial clusters, and modes of foreign entry. Prior to registering for doctoral study, she has worked as a lecturer with management institutes. She has also served as an Academic Associate with the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. She has published her research work with Sage, Emerald and others.