Open coopetition
Open-knowledge reference entry
In R&D management and systems development, open coopetition or open-coopetition is a neologism to describe cooperation among competitors in the open-source arena. The term was first coined by the scholars Jose Teixeira and Tingting Lin to describe how rival firms that, while competing with similar products in the same markets, cooperate which each other in the development of open-source projects (e.g., Apple, Samsung, Google, Nokia) in the co-development of WebKit. More recently, open coopetition started also being used also to refer to strategic approaches where competing organizations collaborate on open innovation initiatives while maintaining their competitive market positions.
Open-coopetition is a compound-word term bridging coopetition and open-source. Coopetition refers to a paradoxical relationship between two or more actors simultaneously involved in cooperative and competitive interactions; and open-source both as a development method that emphasizes transparency and collaboration, and as a "private-collective" innovation model with features both from the private investment and collective action — firms contribute towards the creation of public goods while giving up associated intellectual property rights such patents, copyright, licenses, or trade secrets.
By exploring coopetition in the particular context of open-source, Open-coopetition emphasizes transparency on the co-development of technological artifacts that become available to the public under an open-source license—allowing anyone to freely obtain, study, modify and redistribute them. Within open-coopetition, development transparency and sense of community are maximized; while the managerial control and IP enforcement are minimized. Open-coopetitive relationships are paradoxical as the core managerial concepts of property, contract and price play an outlier role.
The openness characteristic of open-source projects also distinguishes open-coopetition from other forms of cooperative arrangements by its inclusiveness: Everybody can contribute. Users or other contributors do not need to hold a supplier contract or sign a legal intellectual property arrangement to contribute.
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This entry incorporates text from “Open coopetition” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.