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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Coopetition, standardization and general purpose technologies : A framework and an application

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Funding Information: We thank Paul Wiegmann, Geerten van de Kaa, Filippo Grillo, Tuomo Uotila, Elina Berghäll, Joakim Wikström and a number of anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Earlier versions of the paper have been presented at EURAS2022 conference at Adam Smith Business School of the University of Glasgow, 38th Summer Seminar of Finnish Economist at University of Jyväskylä and Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT. Heikkilä gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Foundation for Economic Education (Liikesivistysrahasto, Reino Rossi Memorial Fund), PHP Säätiö and the Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics. We argue that coopetition and standardization are important dimensions in the analysis of general-purpose technologies (GPT). We synthesize ideas from GPT, standardization, and coopetition literatures and introduce a framework for empirical analysis of GPTs that are enabled by standards development and related coopetition. We apply this framework and analyze the role of coopetition in standardization of wireless cellular technology, which has been recently discussed as a GPT. We document that coopetition and standardization have been associated with increasing improvement, innovation spawning, and pervasiveness—the characteristics of GPTs—in the context of wireless cellular technology. The perspective of standardization and coopetition could shed further light on the technological progress and evolution related to emerging GPT candidates, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. Peer reviewed