Roles of the coopetitive networks in the local business life

Abstract

IntroductionThe paper theoretically and empirically concentrates on scrutinizing the Hungarian coopetitive networks of SMEs (hereinafter coopetitive networks) and their effects on the regional economic growth. The coopetition has occurred as a new category in the terminology system of social sciences. It refers to the special dynamic interplay between same firms in which the competitors collaborate and compete with each other simultaneously so as to reach higher profit [Bradenburger-Nalebuff 1996; Czernek, Czakon 2016]. By applying coopetition, the market automatisms do not disappear from economic structure. The competition remains in hegemony in the economic setting, but in only some place of business life the rivals collaborate to achieve effectively their purposes.Moreover, well-known fact that every coopetitive network has territorial extension hence a territory which is covered by a network has to be named as a nodal region [Thilenius, Havila, Dahlin, Oberg 2016]. Since economic networks, economic relationships and the territorial concentration of economic activities create nodal region, it must be scrutinized by combining toolkits of network science and spatial econometrics. Taken together, the paper thus describes impacts of the coopetitive networks on the economic development of nodal regions (hereinafter: regions). Spatial extensions of the coopetitive networks are illustrated by maps in the paper. The paper is organized as follows.In the first chapter, on one hand the theoretical underpinning and empirical overviews of the SMEs' networking is demonstrated and, on the other, short Hungarian socioeconomic background is presented as well. After that, I show how the network dataset is collected and analyzed. Fundamentally, three Hungarian coopetitive networks were mapped locating on (1) Tihany-Budapest, (2) Nyiregyhaza and (3) Budapest including 127 entrepreneurs all together. The study combines quantitative and qualitative methods of the network science as well in order to understand deeply the architecture and impacts of the coopetitive networks in the real business life. Actually, interviews and questionnaires are conducted as well with every entrepreneur thus 127 sociological, semi-structured interviews and 127 questionnaires are studied. The last chapter deals with how the coopetitive networks have impacted on the Hungarian regional economic development.In the next theoretical chapter the paper demonstrates the functions of interfirm relationships in the business life. After that, the focus of the paper is narrowed down analyzing the coopetitive network that is a new type of the business network.1. Theoretical underpinnings and empirical overviewsEmpirical results of the concept of territorial capital suggest [Jona 2015] that the Hungarian regional economic growth and development have been determined by networking of the small- and medium-sized enterprises. At first time Hakansson [2015] concentrated on examining the evolving of the business networks theoretically and empirically, the basic information and characteristics of the entrepreneurial networks were mustered by him. Hakansson stresses that a firm is not 'an island but a multiple system' encompassing human being with emotion, regional past, traditions, special socialization, etc. It is clear, the entrepreneurial decisions, performances and the networking are defined by on one hand exogenous and endogenous assets and on the other hand regional proximities as well [Barnela, Levy 2015]; these usually have to be taken into account by the regional economic analysis.Furthermore, as the network structure is analyzed intensively in the next chapters, the scale-free architecture of network has to be understood adequately. Obviously, the random graph theory cannot describe the network scheme in the nature but the Barabasi-Albert model can grab it highlighting that the real networks usually follow scale-free property [Barabasi 2016]. …