Coopetition for radical innovation: technology, market and business-model perspectives

Coopetition (collaboration between competing firms) is used in many contemporary industries to achieve various innovation-related benefits. However, there is still a lack of consensus in the existing literature as to whether it is beneficial in the case of radical innovations or whether it only supports incremental improvements due to the similarity of knowledge bases among competitors. We address this issue in an empirical study based on a cross-industrial survey in Finnish markets. The study focuses on three types of technological coopetition and on their effect on the technological, market and business-model radicalness of the firms' innovations. The results show that coopetition is negatively related to technological radicalness and positively related to business-model radicalness. The implications are that coopetition is likely to benefit incremental technological development over time and to promote the emergence of radical business-model innovations as competitors seek to differentiate their offerings.