Companies increasingly collaborate with competitors to innovate, minimize risks, and address sustainability crises. However, these alliances often falter or fail due to challenges arising from coopetition paradoxes—contradictory yet interdependent tensions between competition and cooperation. Extant research predominantly focuses on addressing these paradoxes through seeking a stable balance between competition and cooperation; however, we lack in-depth processual understandings of how to navigate these paradoxes as they shift over time. To address this gap in the literature, we analyze longitudinal data over the 3 years it took to establish Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), the unlikely alliance across 13 competitive Canadian oil sands companies to improve their industry’s environmental performance. We noted the role of competition, which we label as the dominant pole—the more powerful of two paradoxical poles—and identify leveraging the dominant pole as a core mechanism for navigating intensifying coopetition paradoxes. Rather than diminishing the dominant competition pole, alliance champions leveraged competition to enable cooperation aided by a paradox mindset. These findings reorient coopetition scholarship away from seeking stability between the two forces, toward a processual understanding of how to navigate the shifting coopetition paradoxes in alliances over time.

中文翻译：

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利用主导极点：全行业环境联盟的倡导者如何应对合作悖论


公司越来越多地与竞争对手合作进行创新、最大限度地降低风险并解决可持续发展危机。然而，由于合作悖论（竞争与合作之间矛盾而又相互依存的紧张关系）带来的挑战，这些联盟常常动摇或失败。现有的研究主要集中在通过寻求竞争与合作之间的稳定平衡来解决这些悖论；然而，当这些悖论随着时间的推移而变化时，我们缺乏对如何驾驭这些悖论的深入的过程性理解。为了弥补文献中的这一空白，我们分析了加拿大油砂创新联盟 (COSIA) 成立三年来的纵向数据，这是一个由 13 家具有竞争力的加拿大油砂公司组成的不太可能的联盟，旨在提高其行业的环境绩效。我们注意到竞争的作用，我们将其标记为主导极（两个悖论极中更强大的一个），并将利用主导极作为应对日益激烈的合作竞争悖论的核心机制。联盟冠军并没有削弱竞争的主导地位，而是利用竞争来在悖论思维的帮助下实现合作。这些发现将合作竞争学术的方向从寻求两种力量之间的稳定性转向了如何驾驭联盟中不断变化的合作竞争悖论的过程性理解。