Understanding the antecedents and outcomes of coopetition

In the emerging role of collaboration purposes and management, academics and practitioners experience a tendency in business practices that do not consider cooperating with competitors as unimaginable. Challenges of globalization, economic instability or speedy technological developments vindicate cooperative behaviour between existing and/or potential rivals in order to achieve or utilize complementary resources and capabilities. When companies are beginning to utilize cooperative strategies that involve competitors they target the access to the other company’s know-how and further usage of collective knowledge to harvest or offer something that is beneficial to all involved. Although the cooperation with competitors is riskier and more difficult to implement at first sight, the literature show a consistent picture that real-life cases or models based on empirically derived content are few represented. The underlying paper focuses on this noticeable finding to shed light on antecedents and outcomes of coopetition projects in business practice in order to develop a theoretical explanatory model on coopetition and relevant aspects in this type of competitor relationship. After reviewing the coopetition literature the authors performed structured empirical expert interviews with experienced coopetition respondents to gain greater understanding on (i) antecedents towards a decision to coopete, (ii) the processes/facilitators in between and (ii) outcomes of captured coopetition projects. The findings present captured antecedents for a coopetition decision and describe the outcomes of processed coopetition relationships in a theoretical explanatory model. The paper contributes to the body of literature on antecedents and outcomes of coopetition in practice and displays what lies in-between the motivation and aspiration for success in these specific interactions of competing companies. While facilitators that describe the decision to start a coopetition and the reported outcomes where derived from the empirical phase – for the development of the model – the existing theory that refers to these elements where assigned to the empirical findings. Based on that, the paper discusses similarities and differences in antecedents and outcomes in coopetition.