The aim of this paper is to explore the influence of the roles played by the stakeholders on the structure of a coopetition between very small entreprises. This structure is perceived through the prism of cross-views between clients, chargers and clandos. Our approach is constructivist, adopting an exploratory qualitative methodology with primary data collected from a questionnaire, administered to 14 chargers, 321 clandos and 335 clients. We used factorial correspondence analysis to process the data. The results indicate that stakeholders playing the roles of controller and regulator favour cooperative coopetition. When they play the roles of mediator and facilitator, they favour balanced coopetition in which cooperation and competition are equal. Finally, when stakeholders play the roles of communicator and coordinator, they favour competitive coopetition. The theoretical implication of this research complements the theory of coopetition by showing that stakeholders in a coopetitive environment influence the structure of coopetition. As a managerial contribution, we suggest that organizational managers take into account the influence of stakeholders in a coopetitive ecosystem in order to implement a dynamic strategy based on the actors involved. One prospect is to test our results using a quantitative approach and hypothetico-deductive reasoning with an analytical framework based on the theory of dynamic capabilities.
