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Coopetition, namely, the interplay between cooperation and competition, has received a good deal of interest in the business-to-business marketing literature. Academics have operationalised the coopetition construct and have used these measures to test the antecedents and consequences of firms collaborating with their competitors. However, business-to-business marketing scholars have not developed and validated an agreed operationalisation that reflects the dimensionality of the coopetition construct. Thus, the purpose of this study is to develop and validate a multi-dimensional measure of coopetition for marketing scholars to use in future research.

To use a highly cooperative and highly competitive empirical context, sporting organisations in New Zealand were sampled, as the key informants within these entities engaged in different forms of coopetition. Checks were made to ensure that the sampled entities produced generalisable results. That is, it is anticipated that the results apply to other industries with firms engaging in similar business-to-business behaviours. Various sources of qualitative and quantitative data were acquired to develop and validate a multi-dimensional measure of coopetition (the COOP scale), which passed all major assessments of reliability and validity (including common method variance).

The results indicated that coopetition is a multi-dimensional construct, comprising three distinct dimensions. First, local-level coopetition is collaboration among competing entities within a close geographic proximity. Second, national-level coopetition is cooperation with rivals within the same country but across different geographic regions. Third, organisation-level coopetition is cooperation with competitors across different firms (including with indirect rivals), regardless of their geographic location and product markets served. Indeed, organisation-level coopetition extends to how companies engage in coopetition in domestic and international capacities, depending on the extent to which they compete in similar product markets in comparison to industry rivals. Also, multiple indicators were used to measure each facet of the coopetition construct after the scale purification stage.

Prior coopetition-based investigations have predominately been conceptual or qualitative in nature. The scarce number of existing scales have significant problems, such as not appreciating that coopetition is a multi-dimensional variable, as well as using single indicators. In spite of a recent call for research on the multiple levels of coopetition, there has not been an agreed measure of the construct that accounts for its multi-dimensionality. Hence, this investigation responds to such a call for research by developing and validating the COOP scale. Local-, national- and organisation-level coopetition are anticipated to be the main facets of the coopetition construct, which offer several avenues for future research.

Earlier work has suggested that assumptions, values and beliefs about the importance of cooperating with competitors (a coopetition-oriented mindset) should manifest into behavioural forms of coopetition, such as resource and capability-sharing activities. Yet, limited research surrounds the complexities of this link. The purpose of this study is to unpack the relationship between a coopetition-oriented mindset and coopetition-oriented behaviours under the moderating roles of industry experience and degree of internationalization, guided by resource-based theory and the relational view.

The chosen empirical context was the Canadian wine industry because wine producers are often involved in coopetition strategies and have varying degrees of internationalisation. Preliminary interview data were collected from 18 managers to shape the operationalisations. Then survey data were collected from 195 Canadian wine producers. After checking the statistical data for all major assessments of reliability and validity (together with common method variance), the hypothesised and control paths were tested through hierarchical regression.

A coopetition-oriented mindset had a positive and significant association with coopetition-oriented behaviours. Surprisingly, this link was negatively moderated by industry experience. Additionally, degree of internationalisation yielded a positive moderation effect. These moderators highlight situations where a coopetition-oriented mindset is (and is not) likely to manifest into coopetition activities.

If firms aim to engage in behavioural forms of coopetition, they should manage assumptions, values and beliefs associated with the advantages of collaborating with their competitors. Industry experience can limit the extent to which business’ coopetition-oriented mindsets manifest into coopetition-oriented behaviours. This could be explained by decision makers possessing information that discourages them from working with certain (untrustworthy) rivals because of the potential harmful effects on their performance. Companies should use their industry experience to avoid working with rival entities that will create negative outcomes, such as tensions (e.g., conflict, power imbalances and opportunistic behaviours), lost intellectual property and diluted competitive advantages. Nonetheless, industry experience might signify that there are more risks than rewards linked with these business-to-business marketing strategies. Higher levels of internationalisation can help firms to recognise that coopetition-oriented behaviours may lead to performance-enhancing opportunities in their overseas markets.

This investigation contributes to the business-to-business marketing literature with new evidence on how organisations can foster a coopetition-oriented mindset to engage in coopetition strategies. The negative moderation effect from industry experience highlights that knowledge of competitors’ activities can limit the extent to which coopetition-oriented behaviours are implemented. Moreover, the positive interaction effect from degree of internationalisation extends the growing body of knowledge pertaining to coopetition in an international arena. Collectively, these results show that while a coopetition-oriented mindset is a critical driver of coopetition-oriented behaviours, there are certain contingencies that can strengthen or weaken this association. Finally, by integrating resource-based theory and the relational view, this paper could explore the different forms of coopetition, in terms of organisation-wide mindsets and firm-level behaviours. This paper concludes with some managerial recommendations, alongside a series of limitations and avenues for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the entrepreneurial marketing literature to account for coopetition (the interplay between cooperation and competition). This paper is also designed to highlight the research gaps surrounding coopetition, so that academics, working at the marketing/entrepreneurship interface, can undertake more investigations linked with this topic.

The entrepreneurial marketing literature was reviewed to develop a conceptual framework, guided by three research propositions, examining the antecedents and consequences of coopetition, as well as the boundaries of the coopetition–organisational performance relationship.

Coopetition activities are driven by an organisation-wide coopetition-oriented mindset – the degree to which managers and employees believe in the importance of cooperating with competitors. Also, coopetition can help entrepreneurs access new resources and capabilities from their competitors; however, “too much” coopetition can lead to tensions between such rival firms. Additionally, it is proposed that the relationship between coopetition activities and organisational performance is moderated by competitive intensity (a facet of the competitive business environment). That is, with higher levels of competitive intensity, entrepreneurs are less likely to improve their performance from coopetition activities. That is, the competitive business environment can affect the delicate balance between the forces of cooperativeness and competitiveness.

Entrepreneurial marketing research has concentrated on individualistic perspectives concerning how entrepreneurs operate their businesses. In this viewpoint, the competitive assumptions of the marketing/entrepreneurship interface are extended to account for coopetition. This paper also outlines the areas within the coopetition literature that entrepreneurial marketing scholars should appreciate. Specifically, entrepreneurial marketing scholars are recommended to examine the antecedents and consequences of coopetition, coupled with the moderating role of competitive intensity (a facet of the competitive business environment) in the coopetition–organisational performance relationship. This paper ends with a recommended methodology for academics to test the conceptual framework in future empirical research.

This research aims to conduct a systematic review of the literature on coopetition to assess its impact on firm performance in various contexts.

A bibliometric analysis of 144 papers from 1999 to 2021 and analysis of literature under the premise of theory, context, characteristics and methodology using the Theory–Context–Characteristics–Methodology (TCCM) approach was conducted using Institute for Scientific Information Web of Sciences data on coopetition literature.

The study enlists the influential journals, evolutions and citations of the articles and particularly identifies six research streams under the domain of coopetition and additionally charts out the future research agenda.

The results highlighted in this study may be helpful for managers and practitioners to understand the dynamics of a strategic alliance with their competitor organizations. Moreover, managers may utilize the coopetition strategy to enhance customer value and leverage this relationship for more excellent firm performance. Furthermore, the results obtained through cluster analysis can be considered as a start point to develop frameworks for a business relationship with competitors. This study utilizes content analysis and bibliometric analysis to assess the diverse view and understand the development of the field that may help the researchers increase the rigor and transparency of reviewing the literature and answer various questions that may arise to assess competitors’ interorganizational relationships.

No systematic literature review has analyzed the literature on coopetition using the TCCM approach and identified various research streams under the perspective of different contextual settings.

Coopetition is the interplay between cooperation and competition, involving organisations sharing resources and capabilities with rival entities. Earlier work has suggested that coopetition has a linear (positive) relationship with company performance, with scarce considerations towards whether this link could have a diminishing-returns effect. Thus, this paper aims to examine the non-linear (quadratic) relationships between coopetition and three performance outcomes. Using resource-based theory and the relational view, this study is designed to evaluate the dark side of coopetition, in terms of identifying situations when such activities can be harmful for company performance.

Survey data were collected from a sample of 101 vineyards and wineries in New Zealand. After purifying the measures through a series of multivariate statistical techniques, the research hypotheses and control paths were tested through hierarchical regression. Furthermore, the statistical data passed all major assessments of reliability and validity (including common method variance).

Coopetition was found to have non-linear (quadratic) relationships with customer satisfaction performance, market performance, and financial performance. These results indicate that while coopetition provides organisations with new resources, capabilities and opportunities, there are some dark sides of coopetition activities. With “too little” coopetition, firms might struggle to survive within their markets, with an insufficient volume of resources and capabilities. With “too much” coopetition, companies could experience increased tensions, potentially lose intellectual property and dilute their competitive advantages. Such negative outcomes could harm their performance in several capacities.

Firms should appreciate that coopetition is a competitive strategy. In other words, regardless of how much collaboration occurs, coopetition partners are still competing entities. It is recommended that organisations should strive to engage in an “optimal-level” of coopetition, as “too little” or “too much” of such strategies can be harmful for various types of company performance. To mitigate some of the dark sides of coopetition, businesses should attempt to use all the benefits of collaborating with competitors (i.e. accessing new resources, capabilities and opportunities), but at the same time, not become dependent on rivals’ assets.

This paper develops and tests a framework examining the non-linear (quadratic) linkages between coopetition and multiple assessments of company performance. It highlights the benefits and drawbacks of businesses sharing resources and capabilities with their competitors. Contrary to prior studies in the business-to-business marketing literature, the results signify that firms need to engage in an “optimal-level” of coopetition to minimise certain dark sides, such as reduced company performance. After providing some practitioner implications, this paper ends with a series of limitations and avenues for future research.

Underpinned by a stakeholder-oriented resource-based theoretical lens, this inter-disciplinary study investigates the association between an entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance under different degrees of coopetition (cooperation among rival firms).

Alongside undertaking 20 semi-structured interviews, survey responses were obtained from 302 smaller-sized producers in the American wine industry. The elements of the conceptual model were evaluated via hierarchical regression. Moreover, all major robustness checks were assessed.

Positive and significant relationships respectively existed between an entrepreneurial orientation and coopetition with firm performance. However, a somewhat counter-intuitive finding involved the interaction between these two constructs negatively and significantly influencing firm performance.

Even though employing an entrepreneurial orientation has been long-since linked to facilitating improved firm performance, under-resourced owner-managers of certain smaller-sized enterprises may struggle to implement these activities. In principle, cooperating with competitors can enhance resources/capabilities and lead to mutually beneficial outcomes. Nevertheless, unique insights suggest that the potential exists for coopetition-based networking activities to have detrimental outcomes with respect to entrepreneurially orientated strategies. Consequently, decision-makers are advised to consider the merits of collaborating with their industry rivals, but also be aware of the potential “dark sides” surrounding these behaviours. Furthermore, improved knowledge emerges regarding the stakeholder themes of resource-based theory.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on how multinational company (MNC) headquarters (HQs) can manage the existing coopetition paradox to ensure innovation within the MNC. In contrast to the rather scarce previous research, the authors argue that HQ needs to solve the coopetition paradox under the sway of a parenting paradox. Hence, HQ faces a dual paradox.

Drawing on the literature on HQ’s role during MNCs’ innovation processes, this conceptual paper revisits the previously suggested HQ measures to enable coopetition among subsidiaries. By applying a sheer ignorance perspective, the authors contribute with a more nuanced understanding of the HQ’s role in innovation activities.

The article identifies four challenges as the HQ faces a parenting paradox that hinders its ability to solve the coopetition paradox: context specificity of subsidiaries’ innovation work, normative expectations of subsidiary managers, potential opportunistic behavior of HQ manager and HQ underestimation of needed resources. The article suggests that HQ needs to become more informed and preferably even embedded in the local innovation networks of its most important subsidiaries and that coopetition should not be managed solely on an HQ level.

Advocating a sheer ignorance perspective, the article pioneers in discussing the role that HQ plays in managing coopetition among subsidiaries in innovation activities.

Studies on inter-firm relationships have recently shifted their attention from dyadic networks to more globally driven network structures. This condition occurs because embeddedness in global network structures may improve firm innovation and performance. In addition, the improvement of firm innovativeness and performance seems higher when globally networked firms both compete and cooperate between and among them. In this paper, we categorize the simultaneous interplay of cooperation and competition in the global arena as global network coopetition (GNC). Under GNC, multinational enterprises act jointly with their global partners-rivals to improve performance, at the same time by sharing complementary resources (cooperation side) and by undertaking independent actions to enhance their own performance (competition side). This paper aims to expand existing research on network and global coopetition by shedding light on the effects of coopetition between and among firms belonging to global network structures on value capture and innovation performance.

Using a sample of 100 firms belonging to 14 industries organized in 47 global networks of different sizes, the authors conducted a longitudinal empirical study over the period 2000-2014 covering 1,098 observations, 1,717 interfirm relationships and 78 inter-networks linkages. A multiple regression model on panel data with random effects was conducted on the sample of 1,098 observations related to the global automotive industry to test the research hypotheses.

Findings show that GNC enhances firm performance and innovation outcomes. In addition to GNC, structural characteristics such as network size, network position and network diversity have significant positive or negative effects on innovation and performance outcomes of firms belonging to these global network structures.

Our research offers a contribution to the literature dealing with global networked structures’ effects on firm innovation performance. In fact, it effectively complements prior work on outcomes of coopetition between firms embedded in complex network structures. It also advances research in the area by introducing the notion of GNC as a network by which firms can enhance their innovation performance and, therefore, their global innovation performance. This study has some limitations. First, we acknowledge that it is focused only on 14 global coopetitive networks. It could be promising to extend the scope to integrate other networks. Second, our measures of firm actions as based on a content analysis of news reports related to firms. It would be important to complement this data collection by conducting a qualitative analysis (interviews). Atlast, it could be promising to include the study of customer needs in the new product development process.

Our study also offers some insights into the management of coopetition. In fact, by taking into account the existence of a context in which global coopetition networks play a role, managers may be better positioned to effectively deal with the paradox of being a partner of their direct rivals to improve their firms’ innovativeness and, consequently, achieve good performance, on the one hand, and to maintain relationships within several networks by taking into account their structural properties such as centrality and diversity, on the other hand.

We contribute to extant network coopetition literature in two ways. First, we introduce the notion of GNC to detect coopetition occurrence in global network structures. GNC refers to a context where actors in various networks belonging to different industries and geographies cooperate in a one (or more) innovative project/s, while simultaneously keeping on competing within and between their networks. Second, we contribute to network coopetition by analyzing specific GNC effects on firm innovation performance. In so doing, we can provide a deeper analytical understanding of GNC performance effects on firms operating in global network contexts.

By adopting network analytic techniques, this paper aims to examine interlocking directorates among firms operating in the hospitality services sector in seven major Italian tourism destinations.

The authors collected information for all the hotel corporations whose headquarters are located in the seven top Italian destinations: Florence, Milan, Naples, Rimini, Rome, Turin and Venice. Data come from the Analisi Informatizzata delle Aziende Italiane database by Bureau Van Dijk and were used to build a network where the nodes are board members (people) and corporations (hotels) and the links represent the membership of individuals in the boards. From this, with a one-mode projection, the authors obtain two networks: people and corporations. The overall networks’ structures are analysed by assessing their connectivity characteristics.

The findings indicate a relatively low number of interlocks that signals a high degree of fragmentation, showing that the interconnections (both within and between destinations) are scarce. This suggests that in absence of formalized cooperation arrangements, corporations might collaborate informally.

This work extends previous research on complexity in business settings, focusing specifically on service companies whose output depends on multiple interactions and helps clarifying coopetition practices of hospitality service firms. Policymaking perspectives are discussed as well as managerial viewpoints.

Not many studies of the interlocking directorates in the hospitality domain exist. This paper uses network analysis for a better understanding of the cooperative practices and the formal social structures of the Italian hospitality industry and derives a series of implications important for both researchers and practitioners while also looking at potential future studies.

Small sports clubs are the life-blood of particular communities, even though many are under-resourced and have difficulties in operating under an individualistic business model. Although coopetition (simultaneous cooperation and competition) has been recognised as a positive driver of performance, the complexities of this association remain under-researched. Consequently, grounded in resource-based theory and the relational view, the purpose of this current study is to examine the moderating roles of inter-firm conflict and competitive intensity in the coopetition–sales performance relationship.

After undertaking 25 field interviews, survey data were collected from 151 non-mainstream sporting clubs in New Zealand. This setting was ideal, since it hosts high-degrees of cooperativeness and competitiveness. After assessing the statistical data for all major robustness checks (including common method variance and endogeneity bias), the hypothesised and control paths were tested through a hierarchical regression analysis.

Coopetition had a positive relationship with sales performance, but inter-firm conflict yielded a negative interaction effect. Surprisingly, this link was positively moderated by competitive intensity.

Under-resourced entrepreneurs (like those in many small sports clubs) should consider cooperating with their competitors, as these strategies can assist them to improve their sales performance. However, they should be careful when engaging in such activities due to the considerable risk that rival firms could behave opportunistically, which might harm their performance. That being said, owner-managers are advantaged if they operate in sectors where there are lots of competitors because there is increased scope to collaborate with “complementary” and trustworthy rivals that can help them to achieve mutually-beneficial outcomes. Indeed, sporting governing bodies (including those that operate on a non-profit basis) should encourage their members to engage in coopetition due to these positive financial consequences.

This investigation contributes to the extant literature by evaluating the competitive forces affecting the link between coopetition and sales performance. Specifically, new evidence emerges on the circumstances where coopetition is (and is not) a performance-enhancing entrepreneurial strategy. Further, this investigation provides unique insights regarding coopetition among non-mainstream sporting clubs, adding new knowledge to the sports entrepreneurship literature. Moreover, by infusing resource-based theory with the relational view, stronger arguments feature how owner-managers can navigate the paradoxical forces that drive coopetition activities. This study ends with several practitioner implications, alongside a series of limitations and avenues for future research.