Global Opportunities for Entrepreneurial Growth

Coopetition and Knowledge Dynamics within and across Firms

Stavros Sindakis, Panagiotis Theodorou, Stavros Sindakis, Panagiotis Theodorou

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781787145023
• eBook ISBN: 9781787149519
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Contemporary markets are increasingly complex and dynamic. Diverse business contexts have become closer, and are increasingly influenced by socio-economic and technological factors. Firms nowadays build alliances even with competing players to ensure entrepreneurial survival and growth. This publication aims to investigate, compare, and contrast the theoretical and practical elements of business concepts and models that are acclimated to the dynamic changes of our modern era. Furthermore, it describes and analyzes the current cooperative interactions among firms, and evaluates the contribution of knowledge dynamics in coopetition.

Organizational performance is one of the major elements required in contemporary markets, and the necessity to promote initiatives for innovation in new technological investments creates the foundations for growth, enabling businesses to explore opportunities in the global context. This book aims to explore and utilize the existing academic knowledge, and to contribute to the topic of coopetition within and across firms for entrepreneurial growth. It is a culmination of recent global circumstances and credible academic theories, focusing on analyzing, evaluating and interpreting the modern status-quo in the international business environment.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Stavros Sindakis and Panagiotis Theodorou

Coopetition is a word that combines both “competition” and “cooperation.” As long as knowledge is essentially valued in an organization, the contribution of two vital elements in coopetition value creation is evident: knowledge management and intellectual capital. By critically evaluating these, we discuss ways in which coopetition and innovation involve knowledge thereby increasing the performance of interorganizational units.

Coopetition and knowledge dynamics contribute additional insights to knowledge management by exploring and analyzing the interactions between business players and the knowledge that is being created, shared, and absorbed within an organization as well as across the business ecosystem. The level and depth of entrepreneurial innovation in knowledge economies are affected by socioeconomic, technological, and environmental factors. Regional and international companies face the necessity to adjust to the dynamic changes of the current global, even political, context. Innovation is acknowledged as a desirable and empirically verified outcome of coopetition within and across firms. Processes of knowledge creation, differentiation, and evolution are indispensable elements for businesses. As a result, coopetition and knowledge dynamics play a significant role in creating new global opportunities in the entrepreneurial world.

This book investigates, compares, and contrasts theoretical and practical elements of business concepts and models that are acclimated to the progressive changes of the modern era. Firms nowadays build alliances even with competing players to ensure entrepreneurial survival and growth. This book is based on fundamental pillars that develop and characterize the evolving procedures within the business framework. This book also describes and analyzes the current cooperative interactions among businesses and explains the ways by which skills in knowledge management are utilized. One of the primary purposes of this book is to examine modern business behavior in the international environment, detecting new entrepreneurial tactics that may have arisen. The basic motivation for businesses is at least to preserve their competitiveness and enhance their investment potential. Likewise, organizations are keen to maintain their operational quality, while minimizing their expenses. Furthermore, the majority of the international firms operate under recessive conditions, and hence expertise and approaches are decisive for their success. Consequently, human capital and organizational knowledge are crucial elements of firms’ competitive advantage. The fierce competitive environment drives companies to explore and exploit the new knowledge that is created in niche sectors, leading to mergers and acquisitions, not only for business expansion but also for knowledge and expertise utilization. Additionally, initiatives that lead to technological investments create the foundations for growth, enabling businesses to explore new markets and innovate. Moreover, the continuous geographical relocation of global market centers generates new investment perspectives for entrepreneurs. The global financial crisis has affected the business world by destabilizing worldwide markets and leading to the failure of macroeconomic ventures. This destabilization brings rational consequences to the political context as well.

Given that organizations are being affected by the (geo)political turbulence and economic variations, they seek ways to differentiate and innovate. This book also focuses on how radical fiscal modifications have an intense impact worldwide. The changing regimes in many cases such as in northern Africa, the emergence of nationalist trends in the United States and the European Union, the fall in financial and stock markets in influential countries (e.g., China) are paving new routes that international businesses may follow. Inevitably, their microeconomic and macroeconomic tactics are redefined. Also, new policies are being adopted by governments to face these economic instabilities. Many countries in the free world undergo economic reforms, such as the reorganization of their public sectors to decrease state spending, tax reforms to attract foreign investments and motivate domestic ones, respectively. It is an interesting point to evaluate the political role in business since governments cannot avoid the adoption and implementation of strict decisions and policies. These strategies aim at normalizing the fiscal and financial conditions. At the same time, these governmental and financial policies have a substantial impact on social cohesion, influencing domestic and international business by changing many of their organizational strategies. People migrate to foreign countries, causing redistribution of the workforce of the nations. One reason for this redistribution is the diverse opportunities that are available in societies with higher qualities of social and industrial infrastructure. As a result, developed and overdeveloped countries have an advantage among the developing and underdeveloped ones because they can afford to dispose of functional and concrete social and labor provisions.

What is more, bilateral and multilateral agreements affect businesses as well as local and wider societies and national economies. The current legal frameworks have a direct impact not only on the business but also on the environment. Law reforms are implemented by governments so as to ensure and stimulate fiscal and private capital conditions. Undoubtedly, legal frameworks shape economic and business activities, aiming at protecting business operational procedures. Moreover, organizations must be ecologically conscious because of the specific international legal frameworks. As a consequence, foreign firms apply ecological practices so as to meet the necessary environmental standards.

Considering the above arguments, this book explores the existing theoretical knowledge and contributes to the under-researched topic of organizational coopetition within and across firms. It is a culmination of recent global data and credible academic theories, aiming at analyzing, evaluating, and interpreting the prevailing status quo in the international business environment. Contemporary markets are increasingly complex and dynamic in nature. Diverse business contexts have come closer and are influenced by political, socioeconomic, and technological factors. Moreover, the necessity for ecological sustainability and corporate entrepreneurship are fundamental reasons for examining the theoretical and practical applications of coopetition and knowledge dynamics in business disciplines.

This book comprises three sections, exploring and discussing the value of coopetition in entrepreneurial internationalization and business development, the process of knowledge flows, and organizational sustainability for coopetitive entrepreneurship. Specifically, Chapter 2 defines the concept of coopetition, highlights the coexistence of both collaborative and competitive forces in interorganizational settings, and aims to provide a new way of thinking for accelerating the innovation process and generating greater value. In Chapter 3, the authors, by incorporating theory on time use into the analysis, develop a new theoretical insight regarding the temporal dimension of multinational enterprises’ entrepreneurial initiatives. Chapter 4 demonstrates the elementary traits of knowledge management in business development. The primary focus is on creative industries and the impact exerted by motivating, communicating, or teamwork orientation on knowledge sharing processes. In Chapter 5, the authors argue that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) need to be properly equipped with extensive capabilities in transformational leadership, technicality and entrepreneurship, and innovativeness required to go international more rapidly and profitably in today’s increasingly borderless world. Chapter 6 confirms the significant role of knowledge in business, similar to Chapter 4, and it aims at revealing a particular pattern of knowledge-based entrepreneurship (KBE) formation, either deploying or maximizing R&D returns via development of new technologies. KBE refers to innovative firms, and the hidden champions within, with high knowledge intensity and the transformation of knowledge into innovation that manifests with new or significantly improved goods and services that may enter the market. Proceeding further, Chapter 7 provides initial evidence on the internationalization process of the Internet of Things firms, seeking to understand which international model could better capture their behavior in the exploration of new business opportunities. The last chapter in Section 1, Chapter 8, identifies the coopetitive aspects of international brand licensing through the relationship between Burberry Group Plc and Sanyo Shokai. The above attempt is to contribute to the coopetition and brand licensing literature within an international context.

Section 2 advances some enhanced, both theoretical and practical, incidents of knowledge flows and organizational sustainability toward coopetitive entrepreneurship. To detail further, the first part of the section provides a variety of contributions to knowledge dynamics and flows for organizational performance. The second part is complementary to the first part, by including several contributions according to coopetitive entrepreneurship through innovative and technological strategies.

Beginning from the first part, Chapter 9 illustrates how coopetition provides a mutual advantage for the collaborative relationship of value creation, new product development, knowledge acquisition, and organizational performance at the inter- and intra-organizational levels. Similar to Chapter 9, Chapter 10 presents coopetition as a strategy that simultaneously combines competitive and collaborative relationships. However, it specializes on the concept that companies have to manage the coopetitive risk by implementing three principles of coopetition management. Extending the knowledge dynamics role in coopetition and entrepreneurship, Chapter 11 focuses on the issue that most companies are still learning how to manage knowledge dynamics at an interorganizational level since a circular economy often requires entrepreneurial innovation among complex networks of companies. Within this framework, this chapter aims at providing a review of the current scientific literature on the critical success factors of circular economy initiatives. Chapter 12 studies the impact of cooperation on performance under the contingency of accidental knowledge leakage, considering that while cooperation positively contributes to enhanced performance, the accidental leakage of sensitive knowledge can potentially debilitate the positive effects of cooperation on performance. With regard to organizational performance, Chapter 13 demonstrates the appropriate mediating role of knowledge integration mechanisms as facilitators of the firms’ innovation, following the current debate on the importance of external sources of knowledge as predictors of SMEs’ performance.

Proceeding to the second part on coopetitive entrepreneurship through innovative and technological strategies, Chapter 14 develops a different way of looking at intangible assets, specific knowledge and knowledge-related assets, such as big data and business intelligence. By better understanding intangibles, the authors believe that decision makers can better assess their inventory of such assets and their skills in managing them. Following the Triple Helix model and the way knowledge is transferred in the industry domain, Chapter 15 aims to define interface features that should be implemented to facilitate the university–industry relationship and thus encourage the spin-off creation. Continuing on the technological aspect of entrepreneurial growth, Chapter 16 aims to examine the factors that affect the decision of establishing a startup by developers who have participated in open data contests. Chapter 17 discusses UAE’s competitiveness relative to four economies for which we can draw meaningful conclusions (Qatar, Singapore, Norway, and Switzerland) and pursues to integrate macro- and micro-level findings in an actionable framework, through knowledge creation and anchoring (institutional environment for innovation). To seize an even more particular approach toward technological innovation, Chapter 18 investigates how education, scientific output, and the internet complement mobile phone penetration to affect technology commodity exports in Sub-Saharan Africa for the period 2000–2012. Last but not least, Chapter 19 introduces digital food hubs as disruptive business models in the agri-food system shifting away from the unsustainable industrialized and conventional food sector and moving toward a re-localized food and farming pattern. These are new digital business models developed to support small and mid-size farms with a value focus, forming new ways to leverage the technology as a facilitator for coopetitive organizational forms.

To extend the scope of coopetition and growth, the importance and challenges of the global economy, ecology, and society in coopetition and business growth are studied. In Section 3, a framework synthesis is presented in which World Trade Organizations (WTO), sustainability, and “green growth” participate within this context. In Chapter 20, the significant role of WTO in decision making and trade policy uncertainty and how innovation is ensured and stimulated by WTO regarding the specific case of the Chinese market are discussed. Chapter 21 involves the impact of environmental sustainability with knowledge dynamics on entrepreneurial growth. The authors discuss the arising dilemmas that entrepreneurs face when trying to balance growth and sustainable business practices while simultaneously making an effort to accrue the knowledge necessary for international growth. Providing a further environmental touch on growth, Chapter 22 examines the barriers and opportunities for “Green Growth” for businesses to flourish in Pacific Island countries with practically no real economy and which are currently under the threat of disappearing underwater – especially for a region that is culturally diverse, politically challenging, extremely vulnerable to climate change and natural disaster impacts, and financially heavily dependent on aid flows. Looking at the end of this series of diverse chapters centered around coopetition, innovation, and growth, Chapter 23 introduces the circular economy and Cradle to Cradle models of sustainable production. It reflects on the key blockages to a meaningful, sustainable production and how these could be overcome particularly in the context of business education. The chapter focuses on transformative models of sustainability and discusses the necessity and associated challenges at the vocational and liberal arts school levels.

We hope that this academic attempt to bring together numerous and differentiated contributions around Global Opportunities for Entrepreneurial Growth will attract the interest of various academic fields, as this work covers an extended range of concepts, theories, and models proficient enough to be utilized in coopetitive and innovative ventures within and across firms.

The primary market for this book is in the area of entrepreneurship, technology management, knowledge management, and innovation policy making. Western and Eastern markets are the targeted audiences. International and domestic companies have the opportunity to utilize the knowledge and data included to improve their operational structures. Additionally, socioeconomic and technological analyses will construct a beneficial framework, which enables practitioners to focus on innovative business approaches, evaluating competitive dynamics. This makes the book relevant to scholars, policy makers, and entrepreneurs who are looking to gain an overview of international and regional business behavior. It will allow them to assess the different technology, innovation, and entrepreneurial maturity levels of the modern era and provide them with insight for future research, policy making, or market entry.

The secondary audience includes students involved in the regional and global economy, technology, and social administration issues. Since not many publications (see Coopetition) have addressed cooperative and knowledge dynamics in the international business environment, this book can be used as a fundamental course book, especially in universities currently providing or developing programs and syllabi focused on such topics, as well as in technologically oriented businesses in the West and the East.

Global Opportunities for Entrepreneurial Growth:
Coopetition and Knowledge Dynamics within and across Firms, 1–7
Copyright © 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
doi:10.1108/978-1-78714-501-620171001

SECTION A

COOPETITION, ENTREPRENEURIAL INTERNATIONALIZATION...

Table of contents

• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Section A Coopetition, Entrepreneurial Internationalization, and Business Development
• Section B Knowledge Flows and Coopetitive Entrepreneurship for Organizational Sustainability
• Section C Politics, Ecology, and Social Scopes on Coopetition and Growth
• About the Contributors
• Index