Trust in cross boundary co-opetition

Industry boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred with the realization of digital convergence, which is the takeover of all forms of media by digital computers (Mueller, 1999). Because of digital convergence, a new application or service may be provided by companies in quite different industries. To run a new service successfully, a company must cooperate with unfamiliar companies in other industries and, at the same time, compete with them to gain a competitive advantage. This combination of collaboration and competition, called co-opetition, is giving rise to new and challenging relationships and interactions between companies. When we investigate the practical experience of digital convergence in the field, the interactions between these co-opetitive companies are unexpected, and the issue of trust emerges to be very important. In this paper, we present a case study of a mobile TV project to determine the importance of trust in inter-organizational co-opetitive relationships brought about by digital convergence. At the end of the paper, we examine the essential role that institutional trust plays in the success of co-opetition across industries.