Towards a research agenda on how, when and why trust and distrust matter to coopetition

Trust has been acknowledged as an important aspect of interorganizational relationships. Yet, limited attention has been paid to the importance of trust in the light of coopetitive interactions, i.e. simultaneously cooperating and competing. Research on trust has started to acknowledge that more trust may not always be better, and that trust and distrust are separate and distinct phenomena. Whilst coopetition research has mentioned the important role of trust, the potential role of distrust is even less acknowledged, although it may be particularly relevant due to the tensions, risks, and uncertainties involved. The purpose of this paper is to identify limitations and gaps in the extant literature on trust in coopetition, bring promising research opportunities into light, and create an agenda for future research focused on the roles of both trust and distrust in coopetition. By means of a systematic literature review, we find that the importance of trust in different phases of coopetition has been acknowledged by prior research, yet deeper explanations of how, when, and why different aspects of trust and distrust matter to coopetition are missing. A normative view on trust prevails and the potential fruitfulness of distrust is neglected. Based on these limitations, an agenda including six promising research avenues is constructed

International coopetition for innovation : Are the benefits worth the challenges?

International coopetition has rarely been studied in relation to innovation. Further exploration of effects of international coopetition, i.e. the pursuit of simultaneous cooperation and competition, on a firm’s innovation performance is especially important as such a relationship is challenging with a high propensity to fail. This observation formed the point of departure for this study, which aims to increase the understanding of the effects of international coopetition on firm innovativeness and how these effects are conditioned on the magnitude of the organizational adjustments a firm introduces. We use an unbalanced panel of 9,839 firms that participated in four waves of the Swedish Community Innovation Survey between 2008 and 2014 as our empirical base. We illustrate that firms that cooperate with competitors internationally are more likely to exhibit higher propensity to introduce radical innovations, yet this effect is conditioned upon the magnitude of organizational adjustments. Overall, our study contributes to the understanding of the implications of international coopetition and what a firm needs to benefit from it