My oldest child is graduating high school this week(!), so this is a good opportunity to reflect on a powerful learning from his high school career. Coopertition, or co-opertition – often spelled “coopetition,” or “co-opetition” – is a term describing cooperative competition. How can that be helpful in how we think and behave in the workplace? Read an updated version of this 2024 article below.
Last year, my then-high school junior son co-founded a robotics team. Each member of the team took on a specialized role – it was no surprise to anyone who knew my son that he would provide the coding and teach others how to code. Just months after the team launched, they were presented with the Rookie All-Star Award for their region, earning them a place in the annual FIRST Championships (known by competitors as “Worlds”), where they competed against teams from dozens of countries from across the globe. A major component of their success, which reverberated throughout the championships and into the 2025 season as well, is a term that I wasn’t familiar with beforehand – “Coopertition.”
As the organization describes the term, “Coopertition fosters innovation by promoting unqualified kindness and respect in the face of intense competition. … Coopertition means that teams help and cooperate with each other, even as they compete. It’s about learning from teammates, teaching others, collaborating with mentors, managing and being managed. Coopertition embodies the spirit of competing while assisting and enabling others whenever possible.”
This is evident in the competitions themselves. Teams don’t compete one-on-one; they are randomly assigned alliance partners for each match, in which they play three-on-three. This means that teams need to take time to understand each others strengths and weaknesses, be upfront about their own strengths and weaknesses, and strategize together to succeed as an alliance. But their alliance partners change with each match, so with each match they may be facing teams that they have been allied with in the past (or will be in the future).
Coopertition is also evident off the field. Walk into the “robot pits” (yes, this is the official term – where teams work on coding or mechanical upgrades to their robots between matches), and you’ll see teams spending time learning from each other, offering coding support or help with spare pieces, seeing what they can do to help another team, and generally chatting and laughing together. They compete against each other on the field, but because they’re so often working with each other in those same matches, you don’t see the siloes you might expect from such a competition.
A prime example of this came in the hours before the FIRST Championship’s opening matches. The most competitive robots during the season were able to lift themselves off the ground in the final seconds of the match, earning themselves extra points by hanging on a chain. In the practice matches before the tournament, however, one of the bars on my son’s team’s robot that would allow it to hang snapped during a collision. This piece was custom cut, and they did not have a replacement. But the team that they collided with knew another team that used the same piece. They approached that team, but they didn’t have a replacement. Instead, that team helped connect them with the vendor who makes the piece, who had a booth at the championship. The vendor didn’t have a replacement either, but knew of another team there that might have one. And sure enough, they did! Now it just needed to be custom cut to match the original – which the vendor did for them there and then. Within an hour, the robot was back to full capacity, in plenty of time for the first match – and only because competitors took time to help each other, and supported each other’s success.
But coopertition isn’t unique to FIRST Robotics. In fact, it’s a business ideology taken directly from game theory. It has often been used between two businesses to share resources, support each other, and build new business relationships. Rather than worrying that the success of the other company would take away market share, companies who engage in coopertition exemplify the aphorism “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
Agreements on standards between two competitors are necessary to implement coopetition, and this is where things often fall apart. Everyone has their own understanding of terms and norms, and if those aren’t clearly articulated, it’s very easy for assumptions and blind spots to cause trouble – after all, you don’t know what you don’t know. Even knowing what your underlying assumptions and norms are to be able to articulate them can be challenging, but you can do work to uncover them.
When coopertition is successful, however, the effects can be dramatic. In March 2020, Pfizer and BioNTech announced a collaboration to jointly develop a COVID-19 vaccine. The coopertition agreement between the two companies increased the manufacturing capacity to meet the global supply for the vaccine, and the two companies were able to produce millions of doses by the end of 2020, with hundreds of millions of additional doses in 2021. A global success story in a time of crisis, and one that would not have been feasible if these large firms kept their proprietary information to themselves.
So how can coopertition be helpful in your workplace this week?
This Week’s Tips:
Identify some potential partners for coopertition, and plan some next steps.
- Externally: Consider building alliances with one or more ‘competitors’ to see what might emerge to support them and you. Look for conferences in your field that would allow you to hear (and share) best practices and build connections, both personally but also for your organization or department. Talk to other presenters and brainstorm (no matter how blue sky) how your departments or organizations can exemplify a “rising tide lifts all boats” approach. Other ways you might connect include Facebook groups, Discord channels and other social media groups for members of organizations in your field.
- Internally: Consider a goal of having your department partner one-on-one with ten other departments in your organization over the next year. These would not necessarily be lengthy collaborations, but would allow you to get to know them – and get to know your team – better, checking assumptions and finding blind spots along the way. Maybe this isn’t even an official work project – maybe your department and another can work together to celebrate all new employees over the course of a dedicated month, or decorate a break room, or plan a potluck lunch. If you’re a member of an affinity group, consider partnering with other affinity groups on events or initiatives – or even just getting together socially a few times a year!
Try these out this week, and let us know how it goes. We’d love to hear from you!
You can subscribe to our feed here, or sign up for our weekly newsletter to get these articles directly in your inbox.
Building Bridges Leadership 