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This article examines how excellence in customer service and satisfaction can be a major source of competitive advantage and profits for small businesses. The costs and causes of poor service and satisfaction are discussed and special emphasis is given to the value of the lifelong customer. Methods to pursue the goal of completely satisfying customers 100 percent of the time are examined. Leadership, aggressive problem solving, problem-solving teams, and assessment of customer service are among the topics reviewed.

Using the family business succession, resourcebased view of firms, familiness, and organizational clan literatures, this article develops a model based on the ability of the family business to use familiness, a specific bundle of attributes deriving from a family’s culture, as a competitive advantage for the family firm. In particular, this resource-based framework of family business shows how familiness can distinguish between family firms that succeed beyond the second generation and those that do not. Implications for future research are discussed.

Transnational entrepreneurship can be considered a new stream of research where migrant entrepreneurship and international business research fields intersect. The purpose of this paper is to offer a theoretical framework to address the following research question: How do transnational entrepreneurs (TEs) develop their competitive advantage to succeed in a global market?

Based on the strategic entrepreneurship approach and dynamic capability perspective, this paper suggests a theoretical framework to extend the understanding on how TEs may develop their competitive advantage to succeed in a global market.

The suggested theoretical framework exhibits how the social ties of TEs affects their firm performance through the mediating effect of a bundle of two organizational processes (opportunity sensing and opportunity seizing) and the moderating effect of institutional distance between countries of origin and residence.

TEs should not solely focus on their ethnic social ties. That is why this paper suggests that ethnic ties in the country of origin and the country of residence (COR) may lead to higher firm performance only if systematically used alongside nonethnic ties in the COR. Furthermore, it is crucial for TEs to understand the importance of dynamic capabilities in developing and sustaining their competitive advantage.

Based on the strategic entrepreneurship approach, this paper suggests a social tie-based model of the dynamic capability to address the theoretical void in the transnational entrepreneurship literature. The linkage between social tie and performance which has been in a black box is examined in terms of how strong and weak social ties may affect different underlying processes of TEs’ dynamic capabilities differently. In contrast to the common conceptualization of institutional distance as a negative moderator in international business literature, institutional distance is theorized as a positive moderator in the suggested theoretical model of transnational entrepreneurship.

Marksmanship data is a staple of military and law enforcement evaluations. This ubiquitous nature creates a critical need to use all relevant information and to convey outcomes in a meaningful way for the end users. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how simple simulation techniques can improve interpretations of marksmanship data.

This study uses three simulations to demonstrate the advantages of small arms combat modeling, including (1) the benefits of incorporating a Markov Chain into Monte Carlo shooting simulations; (2) how small arms combat modeling is superior to point-based evaluations; and (3) why continuous-time chains better capture performance than discrete-time chains.

The proposed method reduces ambiguity in low-accuracy scenarios while also incorporating a more holistic view of performance as outcomes simultaneously incorporate speed and accuracy rather than holding one constant.

This process determines the probability of winning an engagement against a given opponent while circumventing arbitrary discussions of speed and accuracy trade-offs. Someone wins 70% of combat engagements against a given opponent rather than scoring 15 more points. Moreover, risk exposure is quantified by determining the likely casualties suffered to achieve victory. This combination makes the practical consequences of human performance differences tangible to the end users. Taken together, this approach advances the operations research analyses of squad-level combat engagements.

For more than a century, marksmanship evaluations have used point-based systems to classify shooters. However, these scoring methods were developed for competitive integrity rather than lethality as points do not adequately capture combat capabilities. The proposed method thus represents a major shift in the marksmanship scoring paradigm.

As reaching UN Sustainable Development Goals 2030 has become the top agenda of the global companies, they have prioritized sustainability as a response to the grand challenges as well as a potential source of competitive advantage. This chapter poses the question: whether and how can firms achieve a sustainable competitive advantage via sustainability? I critically examine the sustainability-based view of sustainable competitive advantage by arguing that in the changing global landscape we will need to re-think the accepted ideas as regards sustainability goals, sustainable development and the sustainable competitive advantage as the individual firm’s achievement. The chapter contributes to the ongoing debate by discussing the potential of de-growth ideas and principles to solve some of the contradictions and suggesting the questions for future research.

This paper aims to examine 12 factors influencing environmental activity adoption by Australian logistics companies.

After a literature review and collect the major factors influencing environmental activity adoption, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and Friedman test are used to cluster and prioritize these factors through a Web survey.

The results of EFA show that these factors belong to three main groups including social and economic, pressure and governmental factors. The results of a Friedman test prioritizes 12 factors to find which factors have the greatest importance toward the adoption of environmental activity by managers of Australian logistics companies and reveals that governmental regulation, fuel and energy prices and the potential for achieving a competitive advantage, had the first to third ranking, respectively. Some new influencing factors in implementing environmental activities are found such as the willingness to be the market leader, responsibility and risk mitigation.

This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the new factors influencing environmental adoption.

Australian logistics managers can use the results of this paper in developing their strategies and public policymakers can also use these results to improve sustainable development.

This is the first paper that clusters and prioritizes factors influencing environmental adoption in the Australian logistics industry.

Traditional feasibility analysis is focused on the immediate and urgent needs of a new venture start-up. All four parts of the feasibility analysis (product/service, industry/market, organizational, and financial) are valuable and essential, but what is missed is a part that provided attention to the longer-term requirements for success and sustainability. A fifth strategic feasibility analysis is needed, focused on the long-term sustainability of the new venture. This strategic/contingent context-dependency lens considers the organization's long-term survival, confirming that organizational success depends on the new venture's ability to emphasize its uniqueness and fit with its external environment.

This paper takes advantage of the decades-long literature review in Strategy to combine known data with entrepreneurial practice in undertaking the feasibility analysis.

This enhanced feasibility analysis adds a strategic lens beyond the traditional four-part feasibility analysis, resulting in identifiable value-added benefits and awareness of potential opportunities or threats in the longer term.

This research is conceptual and theoretical at this point, without field implementation.

New venture failure is an ongoing concern for many. This suggested strategic lens, especially the sustainability aspect (beyond the “what-do-we-need-to-do-to-open-the-doors” of much feasibility analysis) may prove very useful. Competitive advantage is examined in the traditional feasibility analysis, but this strategic lens suggests a longer term examination, and engages with competitor response.

If adopted, this enhanced analysis may lead to greater success for new venture start-ups, thus less wasted time, energy and money.

This is the first attempt at adding a focused strategic lens to the traditional entrepreneurial feasibility analysis. This may seem like a simple and elementary shift of perspective, but the implications are huge, and take advantage of the decades-long research stream in strategic thinking and planning.

Previous research has focused on the outcomes of telework, investigating the advantages and disadvantages of teleworking for employees. However, these investigations do not examine whether there are differences between teleworkers when evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of teleworking. The aim of this study is to identify of distinct classes of teleworkers based on the advantages and disadvantages that teleworking has for them.

This study used secondary survey data collected by the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE). A sample of 842 people was used for this study. To identify the distinct classes of teleworkers, their perceived advantages and disadvantages of teleworking were analyzed using latent class analysis.

Three different classes of teleworkers were distinguished. Furthermore, sociodemographic covariates were incorporated into the latent class model, revealing that the composition of the classes varied in terms of education level, household income, and the amount of time spent on teleworking per week. This study also examined the influence of these emergent classes on employees’ experience of teleworking.

This study contributes to previous research investigating if telework is advantageous or disadvantageous for teleworkers, acknowledging that teleworkers are not identical and may respond differently to teleworking.

This study provides theoretical and empirical insights into how firms can enhance their performance strategically and financially by integrating learning and transformational capabilities into research and development (R&D) activities based on the dynamic capabilities approach. To achieve this, the authors propose that transformational capabilities in R&D mediate the relationship between learning capabilities in R&D and competitive advantage.

Using a purposive sampling technique and standardized questionnaires, data were collected from 118 R&D and senior managers. To analyze the data, multiple regression analysis, along with SPSS PROCESS macro (Model 4), was used.

The results support the theoretical assumption that there are direct and indirect positive and significant effects between learning capabilities in R&D and competitive advantage as mediated by transformational R&D capabilities.

This study explores R&D from a dynamic capabilities perspective and suggests that learning capabilities should come first to enhance businesses’ competitive advantage. Furthermore, transformational R&D capabilities can explain the relationship between learning capabilities in R&D and competitive advantage. The authors recommend that researchers should investigate the contributions of R&D to promote competitive advantage.

The combination of strategic orientation and digitalization for sustainable competitive advantage among small businesses is still not given much attention in the literature. Therefore, this study aims to understand the influence of strategic orientation on sustainable competitive advantage while mediating the relationship with digitalization.

This study used a cross-sectional design. This design helped collect data from 234 small businesses in Arusha city, Tanzania. Since the study used latent variables, structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze relationships and conduct confirmatory factor analysis. Through bootstrapping confidence intervals, Hayes's Process was also used to test how digitalization mediates the relationship between strategic orientations and sustainable competitive advantage.

The strategic orientation attributes that include market orientation, entrepreneurial orientation and learning orientation were positively and significantly related to digitalization. Furthermore, the results on digitalization and sustainable competitive advantage show a significant positive relationship. Finally, digitalization was analyzed to mediate the relationship between strategic orientation, market orientation, entrepreneurial orientation, learning orientation and sustainable competitive advantage. Hence, all hypotheses were supported.

This study adopted a cross-sectional design that helped to capture the quantitative information. In addition, the current study is limited to Tanzania's small businesses; thus, the findings cannot assure generalization of the conclusion to other countries because of the differences in social, cultural and technology across countries.

This study integrates the concepts of strategic orientation from the strategic management discipline and digitalization from a technology perspective. As a result, the study adds new knowledge about combining two aspects and determining whether they add value in terms of providing a sustainable competitive advantage. This knowledge comes from digitalization, which acts as a mediator between strategic orientation dimensions and a sustainable competitive advantage.