Cooperation, Coopetition and Innovation

Introduction

The beginning of the 1960s marked the emergence of “corporate strategy”, through the first works of [CHA 62] which analyzed the evolution of large American enterprises and the works of [ANS 65] related to strategic and operational decisions. Three works are considered the first reference manuals to have contributed to the consolidation of strategic management as a discipline on its own: Strategy and Structure [CHA 62], Corporate Strategy [ANS 65] and Business Policy: Text and Cases [LEA 69]. Since the 1960s were influenced by those founding texts, the following decades made it possible for other authors to build upon this tradition and to progressively incorporate new concepts, theoretical developments and empirical applications.

As strategic management refers to the entire scope of actions and decisions made by an enterprise in a constantly changing context, the following three levels of analysis must be taken into consideration:

• – country: macroeconomic conditions (broad environmental factors), including monetary and fiscal policy, the state of the global economy, unemployment levels, productivity, exchange rates, inflation rates, and so on. As economic conditions are in perpetual change, the economic measures preceding or following these movements equally have a direct or indirect, positive or negative impact on the competitiveness of firms;
• – market (sector or industry): market structure (i.e. organizations producing the same products or services). Here, the ...