Organizational innovativeness and coopetition: a study of video game developers

Collaboration with rivals is viewed as a way to achieve superior performance of firms in terms of innovation output. Yet empirical results show that coopetition may either foster, hamper or be neutral to innovation. The motivation of our study resides in firms’ heterogeneity in terms of their innovative capacity, that is innovativeness, in order to better understand the complex relationship between coopetition and innovation. We explore the interdependency between organizational innovativeness and coopetition. Our study has been conducted in the Polish video game industry. The data has been collected through a survey administered to all 506 identified Polish video game developers, with an effective sample of 84 coopetitors. We run correlation and regression analyses in a multidimensional approach to organizational innovativeness and coopetition. Our findings show that coopetition is a popular strategy for video game developers, and is adopted by 68% of firms. Organizational innovativeness and its particular dimensions are positively and significantly related to both direct and indirect coopetition. Based on factor analysis we find its three components to be reliable: openness and encouragement to innovate; strategic innovative focus; and extrinsic monetary motivation. While extrinsic monetary motivation does not play a role in coopetition of video game developers, openness and encouragement to innovate stimulates especially indirect coopetition, while strategic innovative focus affects especially direct coopetition.