Modeling Simultaneous Cooperation and Competition Among Enterprises

Coopetition (simultaneous cooperation and competition) between organizations has emerged as a prominent and critical industrial practice that allows organizations to increase combined welfare through cooperation while maximizing individual gains through competition. The formulation and enactment of such an organizational strategy entails designing and operating information systems that maximize benefits while minimizing costs from concomitant cooperation and competition. Coopetition raises new concerns and considerations about the design of data, processes, and interfaces of information systems. Analyzing coopetition can be challenging since cooperation and competition are paradoxical social behaviors that are undergirded by contradictory logics, hypotheses, and assumptions. Therefore, the ability of decision-makers to represent and reason about coopetition in a structured and systematic manner can be beneficial as it can support their efforts to co-design organizational strategies and information systems. This paper presents insights about the initial stages of an exploratory research project that is focused on the development of a modeling framework to support representation and reasoning of interorganizational coopetitive strategies. The objectives of this paper are to outline the goals of this research project which include: (1) identifying the primary characteristics for modeling and analyzing coopetitive relationships, as well as (2) proposing artefacts for expressing and evaluating these relationships.