Competition versus Cooperation

Competition and Collaboration
Humberto Ochoa
It is a complex topic, competition can end the life of the weakest, competition gives birth to new players, it is the origin in many cases of the most innovative ideas and the reason for many jobs to temporarily disappear. It is still to be discovered who is right or wrong.
Collaboration can build wealth too; but finding a healthy reason for it has not seeing many successes. I hope this can trigger additional thought.

Competition and Cooperation
Juergen Peterke, Management Consultant, Germany, Member
Porter hasn´t brought up the idea of competition - he describes a phenomena which is there obviously. And cooperation wouldn´t substitute competition but might lead to competitive advantage.
In today´s turbulent times many companies are at the same time cooperating with and competing each other.

Competition vs. collaboration
Barry Leach, Consultant, Germany, Member
Collaboration may be a fine and useful avenue to pursue but when it comes down to the customer or consumer truly perceivable competitive advantage will generally make all the difference.
Hence I would not support the thesis that competitive advantage has become the wrecking ball of our economies.
Competitive advantage begets share which is generally advantageous in achieving or maintaining scale.

Collaboration is a part of competition !
S K Bal Palekar
Conflict is fundamental. That's why no story - whether of a fairy or a hero or of a nation - is never complete unless there is some conflict leading to some destruction and then reconstruction.
Even collaboration and alliances happen based on finding a common cause to fight against someone or something which is a common enemy.

More Competition Models
Alec Fraher, Health and Social Care Professional, United Kingdom, Member
There are more models of competition than first appear or would seem apparent - the Harvard School Model or Structure-Conduct-Performance Model (S-C-P) is on balance the defining model when settling disputes about anti-competitive behaviour within a European Market context.
This said the Post Chicago School Model would appear to be the going forward option for many advanced economies, analysis of other models like the Rhine Model hasn't, as far as i'm aware, yet taken place.
I think Porter's contribution is to be welcomed but not at the expense of say the ValueNet Parts Co-opetition Model. Making sense of what is being discounted is as much an ideological problem as it is about economic orthodoxy.

Competitive Advantage - Beginning to Breakdown?
Stewart Goldring, Director, United Kingdom, Member
This kind of advantage - when placed in the present global conditions of a deterioration in the benefits of larger companies - really does raise the question of whether advantages in the future are going to be won through localisation and demographic resilience and accountability.
Furthermore - can such an advantage for businesses only be won at the cost to other businesses in the future?
Must there be an inevitable winner/loser scenario in all growth potential outcomes?

People Intervention
Colin Holmes, Business Consultant, United Kingdom, Member
John, you are right. No business would take place without the intervention of people and is the reason why people are route numbers one and ten in my 10 routes to competitive advantage. Staff, customers, suppliers, competitors are job titles for people.
What matters now is how efficiently you can mobilise resources to satisfy your customers needs. Balancing highly efficient corporate output with honesty, integrity and trust is the way forward in today's lean, time-starved world.

Competition Fuels Improvement
Neena Kumar, Student (MBA), United Kingdom, Member
Competitive advantage would remain relevant because to a customer, he is in an either A or B situation. He has to make a choice. He cannot buy everything on offer.
Competition is what fuels improvement. It might take different forms. There may be space for many firms, but competitive advantage will remain relevant. Human nature and enterprise nature would drive it.

Competition Mixed with Co-operation
Gopalakrishna Bhat, Project Manager, India, Member
Market stability rests on a mix of competition and co-operation between players in the same segment. Market stability requires both push AND pull. So we can't dump Porter's theories altogether.
In the business environment, cooperation has limits, beyond which a commercial firm will not survive. Every business has to grow and society needs innovation. Growth and innovation won't come without competition. Resorting to only co-operation over a period of time will lead to over exploitation of the market which will become unstable.
If the power of competition is undermined, the co-operating consortium will eventually vanish making way to new entrants.

Competition versus Cooperation
John Carlisle, Strategy Consultant, United Kingdom, Member
@Gopalakrishna Bhat: do you have evidence for your statement: "Growth and innovation won't come without competition"?
There is plenty of evidence for the opposite, i.e. Bell, before it was broken up (to allow competition) was hugely innovative. Chrysler, by cooperating with its suppliers and encouraging THEM to cooperate with EACH OTHER, drove out waste and gained innovative products and processes running into billions.

Competition and Cooperation
Andrew Blaine, Business Consultant, South Africa, Member
@John Carlisle: I wonder how John Carlisle's opinion would stand up to an examination of the internal competition that exists within Chrysler and Bell. I agree that competition enhances the need for innovation and feel that it must operate in at least one sphere, either inside and/or outside the business.

INTERNAL COMPETITION
John Carlisle, Strategy Consultant, United Kingdom, Member
@Andrew Blaine: Andrew, Bell Labs no longer exists; but when it did., it was all institutionalized collaboration. The result? At its peak, Bell Laboratories was the premier facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language and the C++ programming language. Seven Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
Chrysler never recovered from Daimler, but when I researched there in the late '80s cooperation was encouraged.