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Management and Organization Review Special Issue ‘Coopetition and Innovation in Transforming Economies’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2016

Jay B. Barney ,
Giovanni Battista Dagnino ,
Valentina Della Corte  and
Eric W.K. Tsang
Jay B. Barney
Affiliation:
University of Utah (Jay.Barney@business.utah.edu)
Giovanni Battista Dagnino
Affiliation:
University of Catania (dagnino@unict.it)
Valentina Della Corte
Affiliation:
University of Naples ‘Federico II’ (valentina.dellacorte@unina.it)
Eric W.K. Tsang
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Dallas (ewktsang@utdallas.edu)
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Extract

This Management and Organization Review (MOR) special issue on ‘Coopetition and Innovation in Transforming Economies’ aims to explore key features of the strategic relationship between coopetition and innovation in transforming economies. It is generally accepted that innovation can be a fundamental driver for economic growth, new sources of employment, and dwindling economic disparity. However, increasingly activities of innovation no longer take place primarily within the firm but are often the outcome of the overall set of relationships of the firm. The two phenomena of competition and cooperation have become more and more inter-related, thus creating new opportunities, affecting innovation and change. This reality is of special interest in the context of transforming economies’ transition to higher value adding economic growth and development due to, for example, the specific moderating or mediating role of national cultures and philosophical inspiration (e.g., Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism) in shaping the coopetitive mindset (Dagnino, Di Guardo, & Padula, 2012) and the potential differentiation between countries and regional ecologies.

Type
Call for Papers
Information
Management and Organization Review , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 417 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © The International Association for Chinese Management Research 2016 

Special Issue Theme Background

This Management and Organization Review (MOR) special issue on ‘Coopetition and Innovation in Transforming Economies’ aims to explore key features of the strategic relationship between coopetition and innovation in transforming economies. It is generally accepted that innovation can be a fundamental driver for economic growth, new sources of employment, and dwindling economic disparity. However, increasingly activities of innovation no longer take place primarily within the firm but are often the outcome of the overall set of relationships of the firm. The two phenomena of competition and cooperation have become more and more inter-related, thus creating new opportunities, affecting innovation and change. This reality is of special interest in the context of transforming economies’ transition to higher value adding economic growth and development due to, for example, the specific moderating or mediating role of national cultures and philosophical inspiration (e.g., Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism) in shaping the coopetitive mindset (Dagnino, Di Guardo, & Padula, Reference Dagnino, Di Guardo, Padula and Dagnino2012) and the potential differentiation between countries and regional ecologies.

We are aware that the need for forging an interactive approach to coopetition and innovation has attracted the collective imagery and the joint attention of researchers, executives, and consultants in both transforming and established economies. New journals have been created, new series of workshops, conferences, and seminars have been launched, and novel communities of academics and/or practitioners have been inaugurated and progressively solidified. However, the key topics of interest to the special issue – coopetition and innovation – and their reciprocal interconnections remain empirically underexplored. Interestingly, the two management sub-fields have rather different origins. While coopetition finds its roots in the study of competitive and cooperative interaction and game-theoretic strategic interdependence pioneered by Brandenburger and Nalebuff (Reference Brandenburger and Nalebuff1996) and the ying-yang approach (Chen, Reference Chen2008), the study of innovation originates from Schumpeterian and industrial organization economics inquiry on the impact of the waves of technological change on industry and market structures (Dosi, Reference Dosi1982; Kelly & Kranzburg, Reference Kelly and Kranzburg1978). We believe that conjoining research on coopetition and innovation has the potential to significantly enhance our understanding of the phenomenon.

Since only limited efforts have heretofore combined the two research streams in a systematic way and because transforming economies provide a ‘natural laboratory’ and ‘ideal setting’ for studying their interactions, this MOR special issue proposes to explore the relationships between coopetition and innovation by thoroughly detecting and delving into their relevant interfaces in the context of transforming economies. We have adequate evidence to believe that fast changing transforming economies create and experience opportunities for spurring boundary-crossing dialogue and discourse on the intersection of the key areas of coopetition and innovation.

In this view, coopetition is considered in a dual perspective: (1) it is a setting within which to analyse innovation; and (2) it is a specific strategy (coopetitive strategy – Dagnino & Rocco, Reference Dagnino and Rocco2009) that may turn into a source of innovation (Cassiman, Di Guardo, & Valentini, Reference Cassiman, Di Guardo and Valentini2009; Gnyawali & Park, Reference Gnyawali and Park2011; Ritala & Hurmelinna-Laukkanen, Reference Ritala and Hurmelinna-Laukkanen2013) and, therefore, of value creation and competitive advantage for firms (Barney, Reference Barney2011; Reference Barney, Della Corte, Sciarelli, Arikan and Dagnino2012), industries, and society. The MOR special issue seeks to attract and publish a diverse array of empirical and theoretical contributions that significantly add to our understanding of the multiple potential connections between coopetition and innovation in transforming economies.

The assembly of a robust set of papers that collectively examine the interplay between coopetition and innovation will help reveal significant societal changes driven by the co-evolution of coopetitive and competitive dynamics, relevant to the understanding of multiple evolutionary facets of transforming economies. Coopetitive interactions represent more complex inter-connections vis-à-vis standalone traditional competitive and cooperative relationships and, therefore, require dedicated inquiry (Bengtsson & Kock, Reference Bengtsson and Kock2014; Della Corte, & Aria, Reference Della Corte and Aria2014, Reference Della Corte and Aria2016), especially when linked to innovation. The guest editors hope that the MOR special issue will contribute to establishing the groundwork for envisioning and designing an array of coopetition techniques and tools that potentially inform the world of management practice in the next decade.

Research Questions

The following list of research questions is intended to be neither exhaustive nor complete.

  • • How do coopetitive settings foster innovation processes?

  • • How do technological forces drive the process of coopetition?

  • • What are the implications of coopetitive settings on technological advancement and adoption of technological standards?

  • • How can firms protect their propriety technologies while innovating in coopetitive settings?

  • • How can firms benefit from the pursuit of coopetition strategies?

  • • Do coopetition strategies involve both large firms as well as small and medium enterprises?

  • • What insights can the cultural perspective offer to the investigation of the interplay between coopetition and innovation?

  • • Does coopetition stimulate innovation and the rise of new technologies? Why and how?

  • • Does innovation foster coopetitive dynamics? If yes, how?

  • • Does coopetition favor the creation of new markets or the transformation of existing markets?

  • • Is coopetition more fit to knowledge-based firms? Why?

  • • What is the role of coopetition within, between, and among entrepreneurial accelerators (i.e., incubators, business angels, seed-corn funds, and venture capital)?

  • • Are there any differences in coopetitive relations between and among small and medium enterprises as well as large firms?

  • • How do institutional and environmental conditions favor coopetition within, between, and among small and medium enterprises as well as large firms? And between and among foreign and domestic firms?

  • • What are the main conceptual proximities and linkages between coopetition and innovation?

  • • Can coopetition strategy be a source of competitiveness, value creation and performance? Why is it so?

  • • Are multinational corporations in a more favorable position than local firms to innovate while adopting a coopetition strategy?

  • • Compared with developed economies, does the nature of coopetition strategy change in some way when applied to transforming economies?

Questions about the special issue may be directed to any of the guest editors. Papers for the special issue should be submitted electronically through MOR’s ScholarOne Manuscripts site at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mor and identified as submission to the ‘Coopetition and Innovation in Transforming Economies'special issue. All submissions should follow the ‘MOR Author Guidelines’, available online at http://journals.cambridge.org/images/fileUpload/documents/MOR_ifc.pdf

References

REFERENCES

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