Coopetition and sustainable competitiveness in business ecosystem: a networks analysis of the global telecommunications industry

Abstract

Over the past few years, academics and practitioners have started to pay more attention to a new ecology of coopetition and new kinds of business models which can be better defined on the basis of business ecosystem platforms. Developing strategies to help sustainable competitive advantage in this new business environment is a key challenge for businesses and economies around the world. Using the World Input–Output Database of intermediate goods and services, this study explores the business ecosystems of the global telecommunications industry and conducts a networks analysis of the sector. The paper illustrated an exploratory study of identifying business ecosystems as well as the influence of each country/industry in the global telecommunications industry. While this area of the study is still in its early stages of development, making strategic and policy decisions from the results is a challenging task that require elaborate case-by-case analytical investigation of results from different perspectives.

Keywords:

• Business ecosystem
• coopetition
• telecommunications

Notes

Acknowledgements

The valuable and constructive feedback from anonymous reviewers and their contributions to the enhancement of this work is acknowledged and greatly appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Kayvan Miri-Lavassani is an award-winning educator and researcher, he has received institutional award for Teaching Excellence, as well as research awards from institutions in the US, Canada and Europe. In addition to his academic activities, he has worked with several private, public and third-sector organisations both in Canada and the United States. He founded/co-founded three businesses before joining the academia and has worked in the areas of high-tech, manufacturing, international trade and consulting. Dr Miri Lavassani is a faculty member with North Carolina Central University’s School of Business.

Notes

1 That is business-to-business transaction from USA to Germany.

2 One of the 44 identities, is the ROW category that for simplicity of discussion we treat ROW as one of the countries.