Coopetition and Co-innovation: Do Manufacturing and Service Providers Behave Differently?

Abstract

Previous studies on coopetition considered the concept as a mix of cooperation and competition among firms, oriented towards producing innovation and generating net value added or economic benefit. The importance of studying the determinants of firms’ innovative behaviour in order to produce an insightful analysis of their patent intensity behaviour based on those coopetition relationships has also warranted increasing attention by several entrepreneurship scholars. This paper tackles the issue in an innovative way, by making use of firms’ behaviour in generating co-innovative products and services to reveal their innovative performance and the dynamics of coopetition targeted at open innovation. Thus, we analyse the determinant factors of firms; capacity to generate co-innovations, which is influenced by the role played by policies oriented to driving innovations among firms, cooperation with scientific stakeholders and development of the capacity to generate and transfer new products. For this purpose, we use a dataset of 3682 manufacturing firms and 1221 service firms that participated in the European Community Innovation Survey (CIS), 2008. A probit analysis is conducted separately for manufacturing and service firms and, within each sector, according to firms’ category of technological intensity. The results reveal the significant influence of manufacturing and service firms’ capacity to generate co-innovative products and services, such as coopetition arrangements between competing firms and other R&D stakeholders, and also firms’ capacity to introduce innovations to the market. Furthermore, this study also reveals that for service firms the effects of introducing process innovations inside the firm and the existence of internal R&D activities are of major significance for creating a capacity to generate co-innovations.