Designing a Model for Cooperation-competition Incentives (Case Study: Iranian Handmade Carpet Art-industry)

Identifying the cooperation-competition incentives in the art-industry of Iranian hand-woven carpets and directing the competitors toward this phenomenon, and benefiting from the profits of this strategy have led to solving the problems in this art-industry and development and promotion in national and international market. Competitors can also take advantage of this network and work together to solve many of the related problems. Accordingly, the main purpose of this study is to design a model of cooperation-competition incentives in handmade carpet art-industry. The other objectives are to identify cooperation-competition incentives and to examine the relationships between cooperation-competition incentives in handmade carpet. Therefore, the research questions are: What are the incentives of cooperation-competition in handmade carpet art-industry? What is the nature of the relationship between cooperation-competition incentives in handmade carpet art-industry? and What is the model of incentives for cooperation-competition in handmade carpet art-industry?

This research is exploratory in terms of purpose and qualitative-quantitative in terms of approach. The statistical population of this study includes the producers of Iranian handmade carpets. In the first stage 32, in the second stage 6 and in the third stage 14 individuals were selected based on non-random and judgmental sampling. A field method, interview and questionnaire were used to collect data. In the first stage of the interview, the questions were semi-structured and based on the 5w+1h protocol. In the second stage, structured questions were designed based on interpretive structural modeling method in order to examine the causal relationships between the research variables. GMU version of interpretive structural modeling has been used to perform the operations in this study.

The findings showed that 10 main incentives are needed in the handmade carpets art-industry to join the cooperation-competition network such as creativity, standardization, saving, influence and mastery, unique resources, profit, marketing, establishment of communication, fame and credibility and dealing with problems. According to the proposed classification, it can be said that the creativity, standardization and saving are among the key incentives that play a key role in driving competitors towards cooperation-competition.

In general, the interpretation of the model of cooperation-competition incentives shows that in order to move the competitors of handmade art-industry competitors towards cooperation with each other, creativity has the greatest influence on other stimuli. In addition, in the second level, with the one-way effect of the creativity variable on the standardization, and in the third level, with the one-way effect of the standardization variable on the savings, it is observed that these three incentives are among the independent variables and are known to be the most key and causal factor in the model because of high influence and low dependency. At the fourth level, with the unilateral influence of these three incentives on the interaction between influencing and dominating role of the foreign competitor, gaining unique resources, gaining profit, marketing, communication, gaining fame and credit it is likely to deal with potential problems and challenges with moderate penetration power but greater dependency power. Thus, the results suggest that although all of these factors play a role in driving competitors toward a collaborative-competitive network, creativity, standardization, and savings are among the key incentives for collaboration-competition in handmade carpet art-industry.