Competitive Intelligence and Co-opetition Part 3: Five Ways to Ask Where This Relationship is Going

In business, as in love, relationships that were once the pinnacle of joy can fall apart, leaving you to ask, “where did it go wrong?” Competitive intelligence provides tools that help you analyze the state of the relationship between two companies that complement one another, such as when an external company sells services that help drive demand for your products.

The book Co-Opetition, by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff, suggests that using the mnemonic acronym PARTS can help you forecast how those relationships could shift, and how to plan ahead:

Players: identifying and understanding your customers, competitors, suppliers, and complementors, as well as the interactions between them
Added value: understanding how to build your own value (and that of your complementors) and/or subtract from that of your competitors
Rules: establishing what guidelines define the engagement between your company and a complementor, as well as the potential for change in that engagement
Tactics: deciding how to manage co-opetition; for example, Apple depends on Samsung for iPhone displays, even as it sued that complementor for copyright infringement
Scope: determining how one game interacts with another, such as the effect of government-provided health insurance on the private insurance industry