Coopetition, Cooperation, and Competition as Determinants of Companies’ Appropriation Strategies

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In this article, we investigate how a company’s coopetition (collaboration with competitors), cooperation and competition strategies influence its usage of formal and informal intellectual property (IP) appropriation mechanisms. In addition to firm characteristics and sector variables as predictors for appropriation methods used in previous studies, we disentangle coopetition, cooperation and competition as further determinants for a firm’s use of these instruments. Until now, research has not investigated the effects a company’s cooperation with its competitors has on the tendency to use formal (legally protected IP rights e.g., patents, trademarks, etc.) or informal (e.g., secrecy, lead time) appropriation mechanisms. This leads to substantial model uncertainty, which we tackle by using Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA). We analyze firm level innovation survey data including the coopetition orientation of 1,879 German companies. We find that coopetition, cooperation breadth, price and technology competition associate with informal appropriation strategies, while in contrast, cooperation depth and a competitive strategy relying on design associate with the use of formal appropriation mechanisms. Thus, we contribute to existing research by providing first exploratory results of coopetition, cooperation and corporate strategies as determinants for a firm’s implementation of specific appropriation mechanisms. Our findings have implications for management and research. We find that companies should strive for IP appropriation strategies that are well aligned with their choice of cooperation and competition strategies as this facilitates value capturing from innovation.