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

Authors: Amit Kumar; Rahul Kumar; Swarup Kumar Dutta; Rohit Kumar; Arindam Mukherjee

Addresses: Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ranchi, Suchna Bhawan, Meur Road, Ranchi-834008, India ' Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ranchi, Suchna Bhawan, Meur Road, Ranchi-834008, India ' Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ranchi, Suchna Bhawan, Meur Road, Ranchi-834008, India ' Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ranchi, Suchna Bhawan, Meur Road, Ranchi-834008, India ' Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ranchi, Suchna Bhawan, Meur Road, Ranchi-834008, India

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.

Keywords: co-opetition; strategy; text mining; competition; cooperation; consensual definition; clustering.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBE.2017.085346

International Journal of Business Environment, 2017 Vol.9 No.2, pp.114 - 137

Received: 10 Dec 2016
Accepted: 26 Feb 2017

Published online: 23 Jul 2017 *

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