How much do yourco-opetitors' capabilities matter in the face of technological change?

Abstract

Firms often lose their competitive advantage when a technological change renders their existing capabilities obsolete. An important question that has received little or no attention is, what happens to these firms’ competitive advantage when the technological change instead renders obsolete the capabilities of their co‐opetitors—the suppliers, customers, and complementors whose very success may underpin that of the firm and with whom it must collaborate and compete. This paper explores the effects on a firm of the impact of a technological change on its co‐opetitors. It argues that a firm’s post‐technological change performance decreases with the extent to which the technological change renders co‐opetitors’ capabilities obsolete. It uses detailed data on the adoption of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) technology by computer workstation makers to demonstrate the need to view resources as residing in a network and not in the firm alone. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Intellectual Capital, Innovation and Performance: a Systematic Review of the Literature

“…Rationales for cooperating with competitors are threefold: the willingness to share risks and costs of innovation activities, the quest for synergistic effects through the pooling of resources (Das and Teng, 2000;Huang et al, 2009) and the compliance with new regulatory constraints or industry standards (Nakamura, 2003). Although competitors may be critical sources of innovation and organizational learning (Afuah, 2000), they also target the same markets and possess relatively similar, at least to some extent, skills and competencies. To properly operate, such cooperation therefore implies the development of complex relationships and mechanisms to protect the respective knowledge base, while fostering knowledge exchange between competitors.…”

Comparison of WiBro and TD-LTE DEPLOYMENT NETWORKS: implications for standards competition

“…Particularly, in the face of technological change, the capabilities of co-opetitors (e.g. suppliers) substantially affect a firm's performance (Afuah, 2000). In industries where network effects operate, e.g.…”

Management dilemmas in innovative supplier networks

“…Innovation is defined as a multi stage process whereby organisations transform ideas into new or improved products or processes (Thompson, 1967), in order to advance, compete and differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace (Baregheh et al, 2009). Many studies suggest that the locus of innovation is not the firm but rather the network or business ecosystem in which the firm is embedded (Afuah, 2000). For instance, LaRocca and Snehota (2014) suggest that the relationships within the partners are the locus where knowledge, on which the innovation process builds, is accessed, enacted and produced.…”