Entrepreneurship and innovation in worker cooperatives and conventional firms: the role of external cooperation

Through the comparison of conventional firms (CFs) with worker cooperatives (WCs), which are a type of collective enterprise with significant experience in cooperation, this research aims to analyse the influence of external cooperation on the two most prominent factors for the success of enterprises: entrepreneurship and innovation. To this end, a research model is proposed based on contributions from the stakeholders’ perspective of the resource-based view of the firm and tested with data from a survey conducted on WCs and CFs located in two Spanish regions with a long tradition in the cooperative movement. The results highlight that the influence of external cooperation on innovation performance is more relevant for WCs and demonstrate that these collective firms are not disadvantaged in innovation compared to CFs. Furthermore, the results suggest that WCs have a more remarkable ability to compete and cooperate simultaneously, that is, to coopete, due to their participative nature.