Business Model Innovation in SMEs through Horizontal Coopetition: A Resource Orchestration Perspective

Horizontal coopetition—the collaboration between direct competitors operating at the same market level—has increasingly emerged as a critical interorganizational strategy for enabling digital coopetition and business model innovation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Although prior research has examined the relationships between horizontal coopetition, digital coopetition, governance, and business model innovation, limited attention has been devoted to explaining the resource orchestration mechanisms through which these relationships create value and enhance innovation performance. This article addresses this gap by mobilising Resource Orchestration Theory (ROT; Sirmon et al., 2011). It argues that horizontal coopetition provides access to complementary resources, but these resources generate value only when they are effectively orchestrated—structured, bundled, and leveraged—through digital coopetition within governance arrangements comprising legal, transactional, and relational mechanisms that coordinate interfirm collaboration. The empirical analysis relies on secondary data collected from 143 French industrial SME clusters, with particular attention to the Vallée de l'Arve, and employs partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) using XLSTAT. The findings demonstrate substantial explanatory power and confirm the complementary roles of horizontal coopetition, digital coopetition, and governance in enhancing business model innovation performance. By conceptualising digital coopetition as the mechanism through which complementary resources are orchestrated in competitive relationships, this study extends Resource Orchestration Theory beyond intra-organisational resource deployment to interorganizational competitive settings. It also opens promising avenues for future research by encouraging further investigation into the breadth and depth of digitalisation as orchestration mechanisms and the cognitive antecedents of coopetition, including managers' coopetition readiness and Coopetitive mindset.