'Collective Coopetition and New Market Category Emergence: Lifting All Boats in Colombia’s Specialty Coffee Field' Leadership, Organisations and Behaviour Research Seminar

Professor Ritala's main research themes include networks, ecosystems and platforms, the role of data, algorithms, digital technologies in organisations, business model innovation and circular and regenerative economies. His research has been published in outlets such as the Journal of Management, Research Policy, Academy of Management Perspectives, the Journal of Product Innovation Management, R&D Management, Technovation, Long Range Planning and the California Management Review. He is closely involved with business practice through research projects, executive and professional education programmes and speaker and advisory roles. Professor Ritala is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of R&D Management and serves on the editorial review board of the Journal of Product Innovation Management.

The topic of the presentation will be 'Collective Coopetition and New Market Category Emergence: Lifting All Boats in Colombia's Specialty Coffee Field'. This study examines collective coopetition through a case study of Colombian café owners who collaborated to establish Café Especial, a new specialty coffee market category. In his presentation, Professor Ritala will introduce the concept of collective coopetition as a multi-actor collaborative effort in horizontal markets, facilitating the transcendence of zero-sum dynamics into collective new market creation and demonstrating how the coffee shops together established 'La Red' as both a label of quality coffee and as a meta-organisation with its distinct identity. Collective coopetition, governed via this meta-organisational structure, enabled the legitimisation and standardisation of high-quality production across the value chain, as well as the particular method of coffee brewing and serving, thereby driving the creation of a new market category. These findings extend the coopetition literature and practice by showcasing how collective action and meta-organisational governance by competitors can drive new market category creation in established industries and fields.

The seminar will be held on 2 May 2024, 1:00pm, in room 208 of the Henley Business School building, Whiteknights campus. For those unable to attend in person there is also the option to dial in remotely via Microsoft Teams. If you are interested in joining, please contact Alex Baker on a.j.baker@henley.ac.uk

LOB research seminars are co-ordinated by Dr Matteo Borghi and Professor Marcello Mariani.