Coopetition or Co-opetition (sometimes spelled "coopertition" or "co-opertition") is a neologism coined to describe cooperative competition. Coopetition is a portmanteau of cooperation and competition.
Basic principles of co-opetitive structures have been described in game theory, a scientific field that received more attention with the book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 and the works of John Forbes Nash on non-cooperative games. It is also applied in the fields of political science and economics and even universally (works of V. Frank Asaro, J.D.: Universal Co-opetition (2011), The Tortoise Shell Code, a novel (2012), and A Primal Wisdom, a non-fiction corollary to the novel (2014)).
Coopetition occurs when companies interact with partial congruence of interests. They cooperate with each other to reach a higher value creation if compared to the value created without interaction and struggle to achieve competitive advantage.
Often coopetition takes place when companies that are in the same market work together in the exploration of knowledge and research of new products, at the same time that they compete for market-share of their products and in the exploitation of the knowledge created. In this case, the interactions occur simultaneously and in different levels in the value chain. This is the case of the arrangement between PSA Peugeot Citroën and Toyota to share components for a new city car - simultaneously sold as the Peugeot 107, the Toyota Aygo, and the Citroën C1, where companies save money on shared costs while remaining fiercely competitive in other areas. Several advantages can be foreseen, as cost reductions, resources complementarity and technological transfer. Some difficulties also exist, as distribution of control, equity in risk, complementary needs and trust. It is possible for more than two companies to be involved in coopetition with one another.
The word coopetition and its variants have been re-coined several times:
- In 1913 by the Sealshipt Oyster System
- In 1937 by Rockwell D. Hunt
- Around 1975 by Doug Chamberlin in a class at Adrian College, responding to an instructor's request for an appropriate new word with which to refer to "conflict over how to divide up the benefits produced by cooperation." Incorporated in 1981 college textbook Thinking About Politics: American Government in Associational Perspective (N.Y: D. Van Nostrand, 1981), chapter 9, p. 257. Text is available on-line .
- In the decade of the 1980s, V. Frank Asaro, J.D., wrote and circulated his 465 page non-fiction work, Primal Synthesis: A Balance Between Order and Chaos, which culminated in a letter from best-selling author Spencer Johnson, M.D., dated February 9, 1990, urging its publication. This resulted in the later publication of Universal Co-opetition; The Tortoise Shell Code, a novelization of co-opetition; and the non-fiction A Primal Wisdom (2014), corollary to the novel.
- Around 1992 by Raymond Noorda to characterize Novell's business strategy.
- In 1995, Daniel Ervin, CEO of Phoenix Fire Inc., which is an international business development agency that focuses on building business partner channels for technology companies, started using the word Coopertition to describe the approach of creating a partnership between two or more competing software vendors. This type of partnership enables vendors with nominal overlap in their solution portfolio to quickly gain more market share together than when they are operating apart.
- In 2000, FIRST Robotics had a competition game titled Co-Opertition FIRST. In 2009, FIRST cofounder Dean Kamen received a patent titled "Method for Creating Coopertition" (spelled as one word, with no hyphen), which involves giving FIRST Robotics teams some points scored by other teams, to encourage cooperation even as they compete. US FIRST now claims a trademark on the term on its Web site.
- In the mid-2000s, "coopetition" began to be used by Darrell Waltrip to describe the phenomenon of drivers cooperating at various phases of a race at "high speed" tracks such as Daytona and Talladaga where cooperative aerodynamic drafting is critical to a driver's ability to advance through the field. The ultimate goal for each driver, however, is to use the strategy to win.
- In 2013 Compassion Games International, an activity of the Charter for Compassion, used "coopetition" to describe their annual games between cities about who can commit the most acts of kindness and compassion.
- In 2014 the Caring Citizens' Congress, an Empathy Surplus Project, used "coopetition" to describe how to create "compassion primaries," where candidates for party office try and find allies in the other parties to cooperate around advancing freedom, compassion and human rights as governing principles.
- Competitive altruism
- Cartels are not an example of coopetition because their goal is to limit competition, and the goal of coopetition is to take advantage of the complementary resources of the firms in order to reach lower costs and manage new innovation possibilities, still regarding competition in a further moment.
- Co-Opertition FIRST
- Philosophy of FIRST
- Paul Terry Cherington, Advertising as a Business Force: A Compilation of Experience Records, Doubleday, for the Associated advertising clubs of America, 1913, p. 144 (full text at Google Books)
- "Co-opetition", Los Angeles Times, Nov 20, 1937, p. a4
- Lawrence M. Fisher, "Preaching Love Thy Competitor", New York Times, March 29, 1992 full text
- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/ray-noorda-422415.html Independent, Ray Noorda - Pioneer of 'co-opetition'
- Kamen, Dean (March 24, 2009). "US Patent 7,507,169". US Patent Office.
- "FIRST values"
- Waltrip, Darrell. "For Gordon and Johnson, "coopetition" is a winning strategy.".
- Brandenburger, Adam, and Nalebuff, Barry (1996). Co-Opetition : A Revolution Mindset That Combines Competition and Cooperation ISBN 0-385-47950-6
- Bengtsson, M., and Kock, S. (2000). Coopetition in Business Networks – to Cooperate and Compete Simultaneously Industrial Marketing Management, Vol. 29, pp 411–426
- Dagnino, Giovanni Battista, and Padula, Giovanna (2002). Coopetition strategy: towards a new kind of interfirm dynamics for value creation, EURAM 2nd annual conference, Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, Sweden 8–10 May.
- Asaro, V. Frank (2011). Universal Co-opetition: Nature's Fusion of Cooperation and Competition. ISBN 978-1-936332-08-3.
- Asaro, V. Frank (2012). The Tortoise Shell Code, a novel. ISBN 978-1-936332-60-1.
- Asaro, V. Frank (2014). A Primal Wisdom: Nature's Unification of Cooperation and Competition. ISBN 978-1-940784-23-6.
- Musolino, F. (2012). A coopetitive approach to financial markets stabilization and risk management, Advances in Computational Intelligence, Communications in Computer and Information Science, Springer, 300, 578–592
- Musolino, F. (2013). Credit crunch in the Euro area: a coopetitive solution, in Multicriteria and Multiagent Decision Making with Applications to Economic and Social Sciences, Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing, Springer, 305, 27–48
- Schiliro, D. (2012). A coopetitive model for the Green Economy, Economic Modelling 29 (4), pp. 1215–1219.
- Strategic co-opetition: The value of relationships in the networked economy, A perspective from IBM
- The website to accompany the book Co-opetition by Adam M Brandenburger and Barry J Nalebuff
- Summary of Co-opetition: A Revolutionary Mindset That Combines Competition and Cooperation by Brandenburger and Nalebuff, 1998.
- Channel Register: The ugly truth about coopetition
- Coopetition in the new economy: Collaboration Among Competitors
- FIRST Values: Coopertition
- 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition:Coopertition Award
- Patent 7,507,169: Method for Creating Coopertition