SMS Special Conference Tel Aviv – March 9-11, 2014 Startup and Restart Strategies telaviv.strategicmanagement.net

Paper Presentation

“Competition and Cooperation in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: 
A life-cycle analysis of a Canadian ICT Ecosystem”

Authors:
Soumaya Ben-Letaifa, University of Quebec at Montreal
Giovanni Battista Dagnino, University of Catania
Anna Minà, University of Catania

Session: Entrepreneurship
Day: Tuesday March 11, 2014
Time: 11:45-13:00
Room: La Regence
Chair: Gil Avnimelech, Ono Academic College

Abstract
On the ground of a longitudinal qualitative study of the entire lifecycle (from its birth to termination in the decade 1999-2009) of a Canadian ICT ecosystem, this paper illustrates how the entrepreneurial ecosystem’s evolution relies on high cooperation as concerns the value creation process and on high competition as regards the value capture process. In such a way, it helps appreciating how the ecosystem’s members interpret and balance cooperation and competition in the process of value creation and value capture. Actually, after two initial phases in which they matched, first high cooperation and low competition for value creation, and then high cooperation and high competition to fine-tune value creation and value capture, the ecosystem’s players decided to endorse a competitive structure of interaction over a cooperative one and targeted value capture vis-à-vis value creation. This strategic move which eventually led to the ecosystem’s collapse. Our findings explain the “ecosystem evolutionary lifecycle” by providing a framework for understanding how value creation and value capture are coupled in the ecosystem’s evolution and help disentangle how such “ecosystem coopetitive relationships” shape the ecosystem evolution along its lifecycle.