Untangling the Rise of Coopetition: The Intrusion of Competition in a Cooperative Game Structure

Strategy research on inter-firm cooperation has been commonly affected by a collaborative bias, implicitly assuming that firms interact among each other on the basis of fully converging interests and goals. Yet, plenty of empirical evidence shows that cooperation is affected by the intrusion of competitive issues and that consequently results in a game structure that actually moves away from the ideal circumstance of complete convergent interests. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it proposes the notion of cooperation as a truly coopetitive game, where firms interact among each other on the basis of a partially convergent interest structure. Second, it develops a series of propositions linking the rise of coopetition to a set of, respectively, environment-related and firm-related factors in order to explain the drivers of the intrusion of competitive issues within a cooperative game structure. The study eventually provides relevant implications for strategy research that we discuss in the final section.