Coopetition management, the missing link in coupled innovation between competitors: a systematic literature review

Today, firms widely rely on coopetition strategy- "simultaneous competition and cooperation between competitors" - to foster their innovation. However, despite its popularity, the impact of coopetition on innovation performance remains unclear. these instabilities can be attributed to their difference in managing their coopetitive relationships. In This study, a Systematic Literature Review was used to seek how to manage coopetition in order to improve innovation performance in collaborative relationships between competing firms. The research is applied in terms of type and descriptive in terms of purpose. Based on the electronic search made from reliable academic sources in the time period of 1996 to 2022 and using inclusion criteria screening, finally 84 documents were reviewed and the results were categorized in 28 themes,7 sub-categories and 3 categories by using the qualitative content analysis method. The results h show that along a phaze model, coopetition management can be divided into three phase: (1) pre-formation - including "choosing coopetition strategy" and "partner selection"; (2) design - including "formal governance", "informal governance" and " establishing mechanisms and routines " ;and (3) post-formation -including "managing coopetitive dynamics" and "managing coopetitive conflicts". The coopetition management framework presented in this research can be useful for those managers who intelligently use coopetition as a way to achieve innovation and open a way for future empirical research.