Competition and Cooperation in Sustainable Business

Dear Colleagues,

Cooperating and competing, two human activities in pursuit of the same goal: to position oneself better in a context. Companies actively use one or both strategies to improve their position in an increasingly complex competitive environment. With these strategies, companies seek better visibility, lower costs, advantageous access to resources, complementarity in providing services to their customers or access to complex technologies, to cite just a few examples. However, the real challenge is, undoubtedly, to cooperate with competitors, generating a hybrid behaviour that is particularly useful for the development of sustainable business in any of its dimensions. Thus, coopetition has become the norm in contexts that suffer from difficult access to resources, customers or visibility of their businesses, but also in multi-level environments where all actors are immersed in intricate business relationships such as industrial districts, technology parks, tourist destinations and shopping centres/districts, to cite the most common ones.

From a purely academic perspective, there is a tendency to understand coopetition as an extension of the competition or cooperation theories; however, coopetition is a new and promising field of study. In fact, coopetition should be considered a subfield of strategy, a concept capable of explaining market relations, cluster dynamics, organisational networks, business alliances, social entrepreneurship or the collaborative economy, among others. However, coopetition has also become a strategy to achieve a sustainable context seeking a better balance between all actors involved, minimising the negative effects of competition and, at the same time, maximising the positive effects of cooperation. Many scholars have also been able to demonstrate that coopetition helps to improve innovation performance, internationalisation, tourism development, the creation of P&D projects, knowledge sharing, partnership commitments, teamwork efficiency or risk minimisation, just to refer to the most recent studies.

However, despite its ability to aid the understanding of competitive relationships in different sectors and contexts, there are still theoretical and managerial gaps to be explored concerning this interesting strategy, many of them related to sustainability issues: How can coopetition help to consolidate the innovation model of the Quintuple Helix, in which interactions between academia, industry, government, culture and the environment take place? How can this strategy add value to the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations? Is coopetition the foundational behaviour of smart contexts, such as smart contracts in digital environments, smart cities and smart tourism destinations?

Another important question is to rethink the theories and analysis of clusters from the perspective of coopetition to provide more sustainable local development: Can social entrepreneurship incubators function as real centres for generating coopetitive relationships for better results? Is the circular economy a useful framework for developing coopetitive strategies?

These, and many other aspects of coopetition, are welcome topics for this Special Issue, in which we look at how cooperation and competition are crystallising into a hybrid behaviour to provide sustainable gains and competitive advantages to their promoters and the environment in which they operate. This Special Issue aims to broaden the cycle of coopetition, known as the cocreation and appropriation of value, to include the concept of value return, answering the question how coopetition helps social and economic development. The context is broad and challenging. Work in diverse contexts and organisations can enrich our progress in the study of coopetition. Cases illustrating the capacity of human organisations to implement this strategy are also welcome; after all, we all cooperate and compete at some point. We are confident that this Special Issue will illustrate that we are, in essence, coopetitive by nature.

Prof. Dr. Rosa M. Batista-Canino
Prof. Dr. Adriana F. Chim-Miki
Guest Editors

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• coopetition
• cooperation
• competition
• sustainability
• strategic management