Rivals Must Build Together: Why Bangladesh Needs Coopetition Strategy

🤝 Bangladeshi entrepreneurs collaborate brilliantly at weddings, trade-body elections and occasionally when a tax proposal threatens everyone. Ask them to share technology, research or infrastructure, however, and the instinct is to retreat behind the walls of proprietary advantage. The instinct that we are poor collaborators is understandable, but it is less a national-character verdict than an institutional one. Many large companies remain family-controlled and protective of information. Contracts can be slow to enforce, intellectual property feels vulnerable and neutral governance is scarce.

📊 Frank Nagle's Harvard Business Review article offers a correction. Firms should collaborate on the "core": infrastructure, standards, safety, research and trust, while competing on the "edges": products, pricing, service, data, distribution and brand. His five tests are market concentration, technology maturity, position in the value chain, rivalry intensity, and regulatory or social acceptance. Bangladesh does not need rivals to become friends. It needs them to recognise that building five private roads to the same congested destination is not competition. It is expensive loneliness.

📜 Core Vs Edge: The Coopetition Framework

• ✅ Core (collaborate): Infrastructure, standards, safety, research, trust
• 👕 Edge (compete): Products, pricing, service, data, distribution, brand
• 📜 Five tests: Market concentration, technology maturity, value chain position, rivalry intensity, regulatory acceptance

🌏 Bangladesh's Existing Examples And Regional Models

Bangladesh has an example, but an imposed one. The National Payment Switch lets competing banks share transaction rails. Bangla QR allows customers of banks, MFS providers such as bKash and Nagad, and payment service providers to transact across a common QR standard. These shared infrastructure models demonstrate that cooperation on the "core" (payment rails, QR standards) does not prevent competition on the "edges" (customer acquisition, pricing, brand, service quality).

Other countries show what becomes possible when collaboration is strategic. India's UPI connects hundreds of banks on one payment platform, while PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm and banks fight for customers above it. India's Indus Towers began as infrastructure shared by telecom rivals, reducing duplicated towers while operators competed on coverage and service. Pharmaceutical rivals jointly funded UK clinical research consortia that accelerated drug development while competing on commercialisation.

💰> Sector-Specific Collaboration Opportunities

Bangladesh's largest groups should identify foundations that customers do not value separately. Telecom operators can share fibre, towers, rural coverage and cyber-threat intelligence. Pharmaceutical companies can jointly fund bioequivalence laboratories, clinical research and specialist training. Hospitals can build common patient data, blood-bank and laboratory-quality standards. Garment groups can share compliance audit infrastructure, worker training facilities, water treatment plants and renewable energy installations.

The economic gains could be substantial: lower duplicated capital expenditure, faster technology adoption, stronger export compliance, greater investor confidence, improved resilience and cheaper services. Smaller firms would gain access to capabilities they could never build alone. The danger, however, is cartelisation. Collaboration must never cover prices, customer allocation, tender coordination or market division — these are the red lines that separate productive coopetition from anti-competitive collusion.

🏛 National-Level Productivity Gains

At national level, such platforms can raise productivity, reduce import dependence, spread innovation beyond dominant groups and make Bangladesh more attractive to investors seeking scalable, rules-based ecosystems rather than empires. This framework is not only for giant corporations. Clusters of smaller firms can share testing laboratories, training centres, export intelligence and waste-treatment facilities. But large groups must lead because they possess capital, technical talent and convening power, and because smaller participants will not join a platform designed to make its largest founder king.

📜> Implementation Roadmap

Boards should map the value chain, select one shared problem, choose the lightest workable partnership, appoint neutral governance, establish data firewalls, publish access rules and define an exit mechanism. Review the boundary annually: today's competitive edge may become tomorrow's common utility. The implementation roadmap is deliberately incremental — starting with one shared problem rather than attempting broad collaboration across multiple domains simultaneously. The annual boundary review recognises that the core-edge distinction evolves over time as technology matures and markets shift.

🌏> Strategic Context For Bangladesh

For Bangladesh's broader economic trajectory, the coopetition framework carries significant strategic value. The country's largest conglomerates — many of which operate across multiple sectors including textiles, pharmaceuticals, telecom, banking and consumer goods — could unlock substantial efficiency gains by sharing infrastructure that none of their customers value as a differentiator. A shared pharmaceutical bioequivalence laboratory, for example, would reduce testing costs for all participating companies while freeing R&D capital for genuinely differentiating drug development. A shared telecom fibre network would eliminate the costly duplication of trench-digging and cable-laying that currently sees multiple operators installing parallel infrastructure along the same routes.

The coming years will reveal whether Bangladesh's business community can embrace the coopetition model — or whether the cultural preference for proprietary advantage continues to constrain the collaborative infrastructure investment that could meaningfully raise the country's productivity and competitiveness. The column's closing observation — that building five private roads to the same congested destination is "expensive loneliness" rather than competition — captures the essence of the case for structural collaboration in an economy where resources are finite and the competitive frontier is global rather than domestic.