COOPETITION AND BUSINESS MODEL CHANGE: A CASE-BASED FRAMEWORK OF COOPETITION-DRIVEN EFFECTS

Strategic management encourages managers to rely faithfully on coopetition as a tout court performance increasing strategy. However, theory and experience warn managers to be careful of some risks of coopetition like, for instance, opportunism. In this chapter we tackle an overlooked category of risks related to coopetition, i.e. the unintended and ambiguous implementation issues this strategy might raise within the firm. Based on an inductive field study on one of the largest Italian bottling company engaged in a number of coopetitive relations, we analyze the direct and indirect coopetition-driven effects on the firm’s business model. We adopt a business model level of analysis as it allows us to highlight various levels of impact on the current net of interdependencies constituting the model (Porter 1986). We offer a methodology for the study of such effects by bridging three areas of research: the economics of complementarities, the studies on organizations as complex adaptive systems, and change management. This methodology aims at filling at least in part a gap in the literature on coopetition. Also, it represents a managerial tool to represent and control intended and unintended changes on the pre-coopetition business model. The chapter ends with a number of implications for research and practice.