Reconceptualising co-opetition using text mining: inductive derivation of a consensual definition of the field (1996-2015)

Abstract

The field of co-opetition has evolved as a popular subject in strategy management, nevertheless, it lacks clarity in understanding and consensus in its definition. The primary goal is to re-conceptualise co-opetition, resultantly, in this paper we intend to propound a comprehensive and consensual definition. As a first in the field, our definition is based on the way scholars think about the field, rather than postulating what one should think. To achieve our objective, we use text mining by performing lexical analysis on the textual corpus of articles published in the past two decades (1996-2015). We validate our preliminary findings using hierarchical and k-means clustering. Our findings suggest that co-opetition has seven coherent definitional elements with the simultaneous role play of competition and cooperation in its crux. Having proposed this reconceptualisation, we extend the scope of research by outlining the relationship between each definitional element and other theories of strategy literature.