The literature on coopetition has attracted great interest from management scholars in recent years. The benefits of coopetition have been highlighted in the literature. However, scholars also urged that cooperating and competing simultaneously creates tensions between firms at different levels. Coopetitive tensions have been investigated between firms of similar size and characteristics, namely, between large groups and between SMEs. To day, no research examined the nature of coopetitive tensions between asymmetric firms. This research contributes to filling this gap by revealing the specific nature of asymmetric coopetitive tensions, here between SMEs and large groups within the French defense industrial and technological base (DITB). The findings are the result of qualitative research involving CEOs, managers, and project leaders engaged in the management of a coopetitive relationship with an asymmetric size rival firm, as well as experts of the defense industry. Our research reveals the nature of cooperative tensions between SMEs and large groups, that differ from coopetitive tensions between same-size firms. We discuss these results by comparing the nature of asymmetrical tensions with those already observed in the literature. We also announce possible fields of research for the future.
This paper took the 2007-2020 industrial integration policies as the research object and used grounded theory to code the policies. Specifically, the integration policies were analyzed quantitively from the perspective of the supply, environment and demand sides. Furthermore, a gigantic complex social network diagram was constructed to visualize the intern connection of policies by adopting the social network analysis approach. Besides, extensive in-depth quantitative research was carried in terms of network density and centrality. The finds indicated that the policy of industrial integration is more comprehensive, but the synergy between the policies is poor. Then, policies in the supply and environment sides account for a comparatively large proportion compared with these in the demand side, and some keywords are located at the edge of the social network.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) form a triad of converging emerging technologies, that mutually benefits each other’s. The impact of such triadic dimension on the structuration of innovation ecosystems and on the definition on ecosystem strategy (notably for non-digital native players) become a variable considered as critical by the literature but that remain poorly empirically explored to date. In this article, we address this theoretical gap by exploring how three focal (non-digital native) organizations develop their ecosystem strategies regarding the AI/5G/IoT triad. Our results point at their capability to leverage infrastructural assets to position themselves at the centre of the innovation ecosystem they contribute to make emerge. They accelerate the integration of the triadic ecosystem by offering an opportunity to their partners to develop and test devices that articulate the three technologies in advance in comparison with other competitors. These results shed a new light on the literature of ecosystem strategies by highlighting the particularities introduced by the triadic dimension of the AI/5G/IoT ecosystems.
