From P2P Foundation

= Co-opetition occurs when companies work together for parts of their business where they do not believe they have competitive advantage, and where they believe they can share common costs.

More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopetition

History

David Ronfeldt reviews the strands of management literature on the topic:

"* The earliest expression I’ve found is to "cooperative competition" (Golden, 1993).

• Later came the similar notion of "co-opetition" as fielded by two business-oriented game theorists (Brandenburger & Nalebuff, 1996).

• Network governance specialists have identified “competitor-partner networks” as a factor in “government by network” (Goldsmith and Eggers, 2004).

• Economic sociologists using network analysis talk about finding “multiple forms of cooperation and competition” in new business sectors (Smith-Doerr & Powell, 2005).

• Organizational theorists keep referring to commensalism, symbiosis, and mutualism as areas in the spectrum of relations that run from competition to cooperation (e.g., Aldrich, 2006; Monge et al., 2008)."

(http://twotheories.blogspot.com/2008/12/strategic-multiplexity-another-trait-of.html)

More Information

1. "Strategic Multiplexity"