I’ll have the Combo
I heard yet another new term recently. The term was, “Coopertition”. In case it’s not immediately clear to you, this is, I assume, a combination of cooperation and competition.Perhaps this has been around a while and I just haven’t come across it before (I’d be interested in hearing from readers who have heard this term previously.).
Normally I don’t care for such terms, considering them to be “corruptions”. However, I can see the usefulness of such a term given how many companies both cooperate and compete with other companies. On one occasion you’re bidding against them, the next minute your company is a sub to them or vise versa.
What do you think? Should this be a term we propagate?*
*I ask because I believe that we have the power to influence the usage of words. After all, if the term is used in multiple documents by several different companies, pretty soon it will be accepted.
This article was written by BJ on 6 August, 2008 and filed under Word play & writing. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via 
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It isn’t immediately apparent that the first word is co-operation, it looks like cooper. I would love to see it immediately appear in all my competitors documents ;-)
We actually just won a big award from the University of California. Off the record they told us it was because our RFP response was the only one that wasn’t full of misspellings and grammatical errors!
PLEASE don’t introduce new words into the language – it’s hard enough trying to get people to use the correct words without giving them the licence to make new ones up. I would much rather be explicit and proud and talk about the fact that my organisation is mature enough to cooperate with competitors as circumstances warrant. Let’s help people understand what we mean by keeping things simple and straightforward and say waht we mean!