Much has been talked about cooperation and communication in the internet era in schools, colleges, and workplaces. Many professionals recognize that there are several differences in how students are taught about collaborating in teams in the classroom, how employees of a firm operate in teams. The dilemmas about how a business operates in day to day operations as well as how strategic decisions are made in the interests of stakeholders (internal and external) are not left out from debates either.
Collaboration has limited scope for business activities, especially when faced with specific challenges (both internal and external) at the organization level. Collaboration is a concept and a form of synchronous and asynchronous engagement at multiple levels, ranging from countries and firms to people observed in all areas of work both large and small scale, since ancient times. The objectives of engaging in work to achieve a common goal and collective outcomes reveal characteristics of collaboration that include nature of ties, timeless and transferrable skills of people, processes and more recently, use of evolving technologies catering to the nature of work and context.
Gaining competitive advantage is also limited in scope when faced with challenges of context-related innovation to grow from the current to the future. Probing into decades of evolution of how organizations and firms view competition deriving advantage reveals how competitive strategies have evolved starting from Porter’s competitive advantage theories. While finding value and differentiation among products to compete is focused on external environments, developing core competencies being process-oriented has been the strengths of firms focusing internally. The inside view of competition brings in seriousness and reflection oriented methods to deliver superior approaches to maintain the health of the organization.
Collaboration and competition separately have limited scope for the context of business activities and strategies when faced with dilemmas of the interest of the stakeholders.
A part of the answer to challenges that incumbent businesses on where and how to find the next growth space (and a bunch of products as a result) are in creating and forming competing teams for future growth strategies from within first. There are theoretical frameworks that back this argument, see “complex network coopetition strategies”.
Co-opetition is not about collaboration or competition perspective but a balanced combination of both perspectives to find solutions. And yes, it is common for large enterprises to view their internal business units as competing for business units. Why not be truly competitive while cooperating partly and competing effectively?
Keeping the teams separately does not get them anywhere because of their clear differences. Merging them will not get instant solutions either. On the other hand, competing with ideas to get grants for research and development projects is quite common in business and academic organizations. This approach indicates a healthy competition from inside to get the best out.
First, care must be taken to form the challenge teams for growth strategies with a mix of talent in a large organization. I recommend hungry talent, those aspiring to become new architects of the future organization. This includes talent from research and development, engineers and developers, users, marketing, and strategists, and other stakeholders. They must think beyond their current stakeholder mix too and redefine their new possible stakeholders - starting with the new organization talent from within.
Next part of the answer lies in the lessons from the Netflix grand prize challenge that happened around 2008/ 2009 by putting forward their current knowledge base and asking outsiders to figure out the best recommendation algorithm. A large enterprise has a tremendous amount of scattered talent pool. They need not go outside but must be willing to share knowledge for enabling competition within their newly formed challenge teams. The teams must be able to interact on areas carefully crafted to let innovation happen with freedom, yet keep the competitive spirit and motivation to participate.
Netflix grand prize case/ discussion is valuable for the way the teams were managed by adopting rules and conditions for “free revealing and knowledge brokering" that are quite unprecedented in firms. Discouraging opportunistic behaviors and managing the teams through the life of the various phases to progress from inventing to innovating, demonstrating value is not easy. Research on Netflix grand prize team management case is available extensively - starting with the famous NY times article for light reading. Many team collaboration researchers have contributed to insights and scenarios on forming collaborative and still competing communities.
Yes, such teams can sound redundant when talent is viewed as individuals contributing to uniqueness. Because these teams are from within, working on similar projects appears a waste of resource initially. But the ideal mix creates the syndication at micro, meso, and macro-level for the dimensions of knowledge and economic value creation. In fact - such strategies must be viewed from multiple dimensions of value creation at the various levels and layers in organizations. In the article on co-opetition strategy (read here), the researchers demonstrate “matrix representation of coopetition for value creation”. This includes partial cooperation as well as competition from within and outside firms.
Netflix is not the only one that experimented in such scenarios of competition and collaboration among communities. Such co-opetition existed from ages in industrial districts of Italy in traditional settings. During the ‘80s, the Japanese car manufacturers could beat US competitors with such strategies. The LCD TV market has been dominated by the Sony Samsung resource-based strategic alliances, yet competing for customers head-on.
The ICT standards happen to bring together many competing firms' approaches towards hardware, software and communication technologies. The alliances among airlines is a very common example for models of co-opetition for efficiency and resource utilization. For many such examples, and a detailed case study on how Amazon consistently uses coopetition based business models - in its marketplace, web services, and content platform (kindle), read here.
References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/technology/internet/22netflix.html
https://hbr.org/2014/02/use-co-opetition-to-build-new-lines-of-revenue
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236343099_Coopetition_Strategy_Theory_Experiments_and_Cases
