Abstract
Previous research introduced coopetition a strategy for technological innovation in high-tech sector. Till now, we have contradictory results on the impact of coopetition on firms' capacity to innovate or market position. These results means that we still have to open the black box to understand: how coopetition impact technological innovation of rivals/partners? This research has to understand what motivates firms to choose coopetition as a strategy in R&D? What forms of coopetition favours which type of innovation? And what determine firms' benefits from coopetition? In this research, we will answer these latter questions. A research design is of two phases was conducted to answer our research questions. First phase is of exploratory nature where we conducted 15 semi-structured interviews. In the second phase we chose, based on the results of the first phase, the project 100GET as a case. This project is a multiple coopetition project where four major European competitors in the Ethernet solutions market collaborated together to develop the next generation of 100 Gigabit/s Ethernet technology. We conducted 27 semi-structured interviews. Our results show that coopetition helps rival/partners to render their technology more mature for individual exploitation and use in their product and services. The technology maturity degree is composed of: market, institutional and firm (technological) dimensions. Our research shows that different forms of coopetition could be suitable for different types of innovation, Doing multiple coopetition with unfamiliar rivals/partners' is suitable to achieve industry-wide (radical) innovation. On the other hand, doing dyadic coopetition with embedded rival/partners' is suitable to improve incrementally or to demonstrate the feasibility of a technology. At coopetition benefits side, we showed that according to firm's speed objective, firm's learning speed in coopetitive project and its choice of resource management strategy will impact its likelihood to achieve this objective. We proposed four speed patterns. Each of them is characterized by different speed, resource management strategy and costs. Finally, in order for firms to manage effectively tensions related to coopetition to ensure its benefit from coopetition, they have to manage tensions induced from the contradictory nature of this relationship. Different attentions at different organisational levels led to different results from coopetition.