The Routledge Companion to Coopetition Strategies

Anne-Sophie Fernandez, Paul Chiambaretto, Frédéric Le Roy, Wojciech Czakon, Anne-Sophie Fernandez, Paul Chiambaretto, Frédéric Le Roy, Wojciech Czakon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351734714
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This reference volume is the first to provide a comprehensive international survey of co-opetition research. Organised thematically and written by the world's most cited researchers in the field, it views the topic through the lens of a variety of disciplines including innovation, strategic management, marketing and operations management.

This reference book is the definitive resource for researchers looking to understand the field of co-opetition throughout business and management

Part I

Coopetition theory

1

Coopetition research

Rooting and future agendas

Maria Bengtsson, Sören Kock, and Eva-Lena Lundgren-Henriksson

Introduction

The former industrial logic—encompassing internal resources and a clean picture of the business environment—has largely been replaced by an industrial logic based on the ability to access external resources in a networked and shared economy. This has changed the previously clear anchorage of various activities within the boundaries of an organization, and made the roles of different firms (i.e., competitors, customers, and suppliers) unclear, which makes the understanding of new forms of business relationship and network contexts important. Research on coopetition had already acknowledged this change in the 1990s and has increased dramatically during the last fifteen years (Bengtsson & Raza-Ullah, 2016). It has even been argued to be a new paradigm for research that takes the changed character of today’s business into account (Bengtsson et al., 2010; Yamï et al., 2010).

Research on coopetition has been developed over almost three decades. Seminal work in the 1990s focused on the simultaneity of contradicting logics of cooperation and competition (Bengtsson & Kock, 1995, 1999; Gnyawali & Madhavan, 2001), different types of coopetition (Dowling et al., 1996; Lado et al., 1997), and coopetition strategies (Bengtsson & Kock, 2000; Brandenburger & Nalebuff, 1996). This work primarily provided conceptual attempts to broadly defined coopetition, its antecedents and outcomes, and capabilities or strategies needed to manage coopetition. Recent reviews of the field show that further recent research on coopetition has contributed extensively to the field’s development by providing empirical examinations of coopetition focusing on more specific dimensions (Bengtsson et al., 2013; Bengtsson & Raza-Ullah, 2016; Bouncken et al., 2015; Gast et al., 2015; Gnyawali & Song, 2016). This suggests that the research field has reached a breaking point, and that it is time to reflect upon the past and present in terms of what has been accomplished, as well as to generate agendas for future research.

Coopetition research makes an essential contribution to the understanding of today’s changing business environment, but the field of research is fragmented. The definitions and adopted theoretical perspectives are shattered, and the theory of coopetition research has been argued to suffer from incompleteness. Several scholars argue that the field is lacking coherence in the adoption of theories (Bengtsson et al., 2010), and that the lack of precision when it comes to adopting a general definition of coopetition has even been problematic, hindering further advancements of the field (Bengtsson et al., 2013; Gnyawali & Song, 2016). In this chapter, we will discuss the the rooting of coopetition and discuss the implications of the incongruence; we suggest that one solution could be to acknowledge that coopetition appears on many levels, and we also emphasize the multi-level character of the phenomenon, which has been underresearched.

Definitions and theoretical rooting of coopetition

We argue that coopetition is a business relationship, but in previous research the term “coopetition” has been used to describe many different things. Concepts such as coopetition strategy and coopetition advantages (Padula & Dagnino, 2007; Yamï et al., 2010), coopetition as practices (Dahl et al., 2016) and coopetition paradox (Bengtsson & Raza-Ullah, 2017; Gnyawali et al., 2016; Raza-Ullah, 2017), as well as coopetition mindsets (Gnyawali & Park, 2009) and coopetition business models (Ritala et al., 2014), have been born. These different conceptualizations bring in different theoretical perspectives on coopetition. It is important to further discuss the underlying assumptions and theoretical rooting of different concepts to detect what coopetition could be.

Network theory, research on competition dynamics, the resource-based view (RBV) and game theory are four important roots of coopetition research (dashed arrows in Figure 1.1.). This rooting has implications for how the phenomenon is depicted and understood. By tradition, relationships between buyers and sellers have been in focus when studying business networks, while relationships between competing companies have received less research attention within this research field (Ford & Håkansson, 2013). Actors are, according to network theory, embedded in relationships with other firms in order to gain access to needed resources (Kock, 1991). Håkansson and Snehota (2006) argue, in line with Richardson (1972), that “no business is an island,” indicating that companies are involved in long-term relationships and that atomistic companies do not exist. The relationships in focus have mainly been cooperative relationships. In contrary, theories on competitive dynamics explain the interaction among competitors through firms’ actions and responses, and pay little attention to the cooperation between firms (c.f. Chen, 1996; Smith et al., 1991). Inter-firm competition is explained by the structure of industry and the behavior of the firms, and emphasizes the repertoires of strategic actions that firms can use to achieve dominance and shape the market (c.f. Chen & Miller, 1994; Santos & Eisenhardt, 2009). Research on coopetition has developed by linking these two lines of research together.

Network researchers started to realize that “a firm must coordinate its management of horizontally and vertically directed network relationships in order to obtain a favorable and stable overall network position” (Elg & Johansson, 1996), and started to evoke the idea that it is not enough to only study relationships of cooperation; competition also plays a vital role in networks. The role of cooperation for dynamic coopetition was also stressed. Gnyawali and Madhavan (2001) provided an early attempt at further developing the theory on competitive dynamics by explaining competitive actions and responses with firms embedded in networks, aguing that “actors’ purposeful actions [in competition] are embedded in concrete and enduring strategic relationships that impact those actions and their outcomes”. More recently, Zang et al. (2010: 78) have extended this argument and propose that the presence of competition “is not limited to horizontal alliances but is contained in any type of alliances,” implying that coopetition is involved in all relationships.

To acknowledge that cooperation and competition are equally important and coexistent challenges the previously clear distinction between actors with different roles in networks and industries. Traditional network theory assumes that the relations between a firm and its customers and suppliers are well-defined and that the roles of different actors in relation to a focal firm are clear. The definition of roles is nowadays difficult as roles are not as clear-cut as they used to be. A customer in one activity can at the same time be a competitor, supplier or partner in other activities. Moreover, different forms of direct and indirect competition and cooperation further blur roles and their definitions. Similarly, the definition of competitors was also once clear. All companies in the same industry are generally seen as competitors (Porter, 1980), indicating that all companies providing similar product solutions that satisfy similar customer needs are competitors. This definition has been nuanced by defining competitors as firms in the same strategic group that differ from other groups of firms in the same industry through strategic decisions.

The conceptualization of firms, based on their roles, as competitors, partners, suppliers, and so on is less relevant in present business practice as the same actors can compete and cooperate at the same time (Bengtsson & Kock, 1999, 2000). The concept of role-set, developed by Merton (1957), and the concept of role conflict, presented by Shenkar and Zeira (1992), have been suggested as useful means to solve this problem (Bengtsson & Kock, 2003). A firm can have at least five different roles—as buyer, supplier, competitor, collaborative partner, and complementary actor—that can be part of the role-set in a firm’s relation to another firm. Thus, the activities performed within a relationship can enable or force actors to simultaneously take on many different roles, with conflicts or tension possibly arising between them. Ross and Robertson (2007) address this problem in a similar way, introducing the concept of compound relationships, suggesting that such relationships consist of many sub-relationships. However, we suggest that to capture coopetition relationships between firms we should abound the concept of roles when dyadic relations are discussed and instead talk about activities and the interactions related to them.

Based on the resource-based view (e.g., Barney, 1991; Peteraf, 1993) coopetition research focuses also on the firm specific advantages that can be obtained through coopetition. Cooperating with competitors becomes a quest for resources that would otherwise be inaccessible for firms (e.g., Bonel & Rocco, 2009; Gnyawali & Park, 2009) that in turn can be used to create and ameliorate a firm’s competitive advantage. The firm’s capability, based on its own resources and strength, to leverage externally accessed knowledge and resources is critical for the firm’s appropriation of them for private gains. Finally, in line with research on dynamic competition, game theory emphasizes the dynamic aspects of interactions among firms, which in turn are linked to coopetition as strategy. Brandenburger and Nalebuff (1996) extend the pure competitive perspective of game theory and argue that “[the] firm can use game theory to achieve positive-sum gains by changing the players, the rules of the game, and the scope of the game” (Gnyawali & Park, 2009: 312). Positions and roles are argued to be important when coopetition strategies are developed. An actor’s position in a business network helps in accessing new competitive capabilities and enhances the possibilities to attract new researches and relationships (Gnyawali & Madhavan, 2001). If we also acknowledge that a focal firm can have both direct relationships with a firm and, through this relationship, also have indirect relationships with other firms in the network it becomes important to understand the network context to be able to navigate in a business environment were there are multiple, continuously changing roles for different actors. It is more relevant to discuss roles and positions on the network level as firms on an aggregated level can be defined as mainly being a competitor, customer, or supplier within a specific industry or network. The dynamic aspects of coopetition put great demands not only on firms, but also on current research. Dynamic business models need to be developed that capture the dynamic interplay between actors in networks and that account for the continuously changing roles that different actors play.

The study of coopetition must still be regarded as a nascent field of research. Many empirical studies have been undertaken demonstrating the relevance of coopetition in business life and research (Bouncken et al., 2015; Gnyawali & Song, 2016); however, several challenges point to the need to widen the scope of the studies. For example, in order to understand the real dynamics of coopetition, focus needs to shift upwards, moving from studying one relationship to studying the network level (e.g., Czakon & Czernek, 2016). At the same time, we need to move downward, deeper analyzing the coopetitive activities, as well as different perceptions of these, between the individuals in organizations that are involved in coopetition. Put differently, we need to understand the origin and coping of tensions and conflicts at multiple levels that coopetition creates through the transfer and non-transfer of knowledge between organizations that are positioned as compe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction Coopetition: From neologism to a new paradigm
• Part I Coopetition theory
• Part II Coopetition antecedents and drivers
• Part III Coopetition tensions and management
• Part IV Coopetition at different levels
• Part V Coopetition outcomes and implications
• Part VI Coopetition beyond strategy
• Index