ABSTRACT
The label “coopetition strategy” is to some still nonsense or baloney. To some others it is instead an expression that increasingly appears illuminating and revealing. Coopetition is about interaction and actor interface, while strategy broadly regards planning and selecting a course of action. For this reason, in our understanding, the two terms are perfectly hitched. It is nonetheless true that the word coopetition still carries with it some intricacy and has not achieved the status of a universally known trademark. The intricacy regards especially the positive acceptance of the term in standard managerial language that inescapably requires the acquisition of legitimacy. As Thomas Jefferson (1820) pointed out almost two centuries ago: “When an individual uses a new word, if ill formed, it is rejected in society; if well formed, adopted, and after due time, laid up in the depository of dictionaries.” Accordingly, the Jeffersonian process of sound neologization requires a word to acquire legitimacy, and this process is generally made via “path recognition”. Likewise social animal and human interaction, by “path recognition”, we mean that a word can be easily acknowledged by its community of reference by way of the recognition of its meaning. Actually, when an MBA student, a business executive or a consultant reads or hears a specific word, let’s say the word “competition”, he/she immediately and automatically credits to it a connotation that is the result of a pathway that the word’s use has traced across time and space (and in standard textbooks or handbooks). In order to do so, the recognizer is to be equipped ex ante for the recognition of the word’s significance and its significance path. In the case of coopetition, the process of path recognition is seemingly at its inception. Consequently, this book intends to pioneer the attempt to convert a “liquid” word into a ordinary tangible and accepted word. In a nutshell, this book aims to draw an illustration of what we term a coopetition strategy investigation path.
