Abstract
In 1932, amidst economic collapse, Walter Beech, founder of Beech Aircraft Co., declared: “We’re going to build the best damn airplane ever and no near depression is going to stop us.” Today, those words greet passengers departing from Gate 6 at Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport in Wichita, Kansas. This paper examines how such defiant entrepreneurial agency and sustained coopetition among aviation entrepreneurs was embedded within, and constitutive of Wichita’s emergence as the “Air Capital of the World” between 1925 and 1945.
During this period, the Cessna Aircraft Company, Steerman Aircraft, and Beech Aircraft Co. operated in close geographic proximity, sharing labour pools, suppliers, financiers, and political networks while simultaneously competing for military and civilian contracts. An entrepreneurial ecosystems perspective would typically characterise this as a collaborative community marked by trust, knowledge spillovers, and shared identity, while industrial cluster research emphasises competitive rivalry as a driver of innovation. However, we know far less about how rivalry and interdependence are actively organised. How do competing firms construct a regional ecosystem while simultaneously contesting markets, labour, and state resources?
Drawing on archival materials from Wichita State University Special Collections, alongside holdings at the Kansas Aviation Museum, this study employs temporal bracketing to trace shifting forms of inter-firm interdependence. The analysis identifies three relational phases: (1) relational fluidity (1925-1929), characterised by labour mobility and shared experimentation; competitive strain and strategic realignment (1930-1936) as The Depression intensified rivalry while coordinating around infrastructure and political lobbying; and structured interdependence (1937-1945), in which federal defence procurement formalised subcontracting relationships and institutional ties.
The findings demonstrate that Wichita’s aviation ecosystem emerged through structured coopetition: rivalry generated differentiation and technical innovation, while collaboration stabilised the regional production system and strengthened collective engagement with the state. Crisis did not fragment the ecosystem. Instead, it deepened coordination and institutional embeddedness. The paper contributes to entrepreneurial ecosystem theory by historicising coopetition as a constitutive mechanism for ecosystem formation, showing that ecosystems are politically mediated relational achievements sustained through the organised coexistence of competition and collaboration over time.