Keeping things cordial: Competition, cooperation and coopetition in venture capital syndicates

作者：Yan Zhong, A. S. Wang, Rick Aalbers, Killian J. McCarthy, Ruling Zhang · 发表于：Journal of Business Research · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115638 · 被引用次数：5 · 研究领域：Business Strategy and Innovation、Private Equity and Venture Capital、Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences

• Firms increasingly operate in coopetitive environments. • Network theory explains when coopetition aids performance. • Analyzed networks of 4,024 VCs and 5,123 start-ups. • Find that competition and cooperation jointly shape performance outcomes. • Triangulate findings with interviews from senior industry experts. Firms increasingly find themselves in coopetitive situations − collaborating with rivals to co-create value while simultaneously competing with them to capture it. Research offers mixed insights, however, into when coopetition enhances or undermines performance. This study draws on network theory to examine how embedded interfirm relationships shape the outcomes of coopetition. We theorize that two forms of embeddedness—relational (direct, trust-based ties) and structural (indirect, network-spanning connections)—moderate the relationship between competition and performance. Using data on 56,953 venture capital (VC) funding rounds involving 4,024 investors and 5,123 start-ups, we find that prior cooperative ties enhance syndicate performance, while prior competitive ties follow an inverted U-shaped pattern. Crucially, we show that these effects are interdependent: moderate competition boosts performance when prior cooperation is low, while low competition is more beneficial when relational embeddedness is high. We triangulate our findings with interviews from senior industry experts representing over 60 years of collective experience. In so doing, we reconceptualiz...