EXPRESS: Coopetition as a collective strategy: The lenses of multipolarity, alignment, and relationality

Coopetition is widely viewed as a strategy through which firms collaborate with competitors to enhance both firm-specific and collective value creation and capture. Yet, the strategic boundaries of coopetition remain ambiguous, particularly regarding whether it constitutes a firm-level or a collective strategy. To address this ambiguity, and drawing on a resource-based theory foundation, this essay conceptualizes coopetition as a collective strategy through three lenses: multipolarity, alignment, and relationality. The multipolar lens views coopetition strategy as a configuration of firm-specific resource bases and strategic intents, in which different firms simultaneously leverage their proprietary resources and access or acquire competitors' resources. The alignment lens emphasizes deliberately designed synergies across different firms’ complementary and supplementary resource bases that generate greater joint value than when those resources are used separately. Finally, the relationality lens portrays coopetition as a setting for developing relational resource portfolios and routines that create idiosyncratic advantages relative to external competitors.