Creating cooperative advantage: The roles of identification, trust, and time

• This study is concerned with relationship-based value creation resulting in distributed benefits.
• The idea of competitive advantage is an oxymoron in industrial networks.
• The metaphor of a 'shadow' deserves to be complemented with a “sunshine of the future” metaphor.
• Cooperative advantage builds on identification, trust and time focus.
• Alliance failures in general are often explained by trust issues or lack of identification.

This study promotes the notion of cooperative advantage as an alternative to the common emphasis on competitive advantage. In a challenging setting, identification, trust and time focus emerged as central cooperative advantage preconditions between actors with different worldviews. Creating cooperative advantage is associated with these three dimensions and their interplay through acknowledgment, respect and patience—central managerial qualities present in the case. The notion of cooperative advantage is related to industrial network theory and the strategic management discipline.