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Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to study how dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation (competitive aggressiveness, proactiveness and risk taking) affect international performance in competitive and technology-intensive international environments.

Methodology/approach – To address the research questions, structural equation modelling is applied to Finnish survey data (N=271).

Findings – Our findings reveal that the dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation are differentially related to international performance, and that their effect is contingent on moderating variables.

Research limitations – One limitation is the use of cross-sectional data as it limits the possibility of drawing strong conclusions from the development of the relationships between the different constructs. Also the fact that the study was conducted in a single-country setting is a limitation.

Practical implications – Results indicate that entrepreneurial behaviour is of importance for international business managers. However, results imply that prior to striving for proactive behaviour, competitive aggressiveness and venturesome risk taking managers should study their international market environments carefully and truly understand the nature of these turbulent markets, as in many occasions strong emphasis on entrepreneurial behaviour did not contribute positively to the international performance indicators, such as increasing sales and profits.

Originality/value of the chapter – Present study extends the works of Zahra and Garvis (2000), Lumpkin and Dess (2001) and Wiklund and Shepherd (2005), for example, by (a) applying entrepreneurial orientation on international business, (b) examining the effects of different dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation on a firm's international performance and (c) extending the research of the role of moderating effects on the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance.

This study investigates the extent to which a firm’s centrality and autonomy in its supply network are associated with the intensity and complexity of its competitive actions.

Utilizing social network analysis and dynamic panel data models, this study analyzes a comprehensive panel dataset with 10,802 firm-year observations across various industries between 2011 and 2018 to test the hypotheses.

Our findings show that a firm’s level of centrality in its supply network has an inverted U-shaped relationship with both competitive intensity and competitive complexity. In addition, the turning points of these two inverted U-shaped relationships differ in that firms with a lower level of centrality tend to compete aggressively by launching more actions within fewer categories, while firms with a higher level of centrality tend to compete aggressively by launching fewer actions that cover a larger range of categories. Finally, we find that a firm’s structural autonomy has a positive relationship with competitive complexity.

This study bridges the gap between the supply chain management literature and strategic management literature and investigates how supply networks shape competitive aggressiveness. In particular, this research investigates how a firm’s structural position in its supply network affects its competitive actions, an important intermediate mechanism for competitive advantage that has been overlooked in the supply chain management literature.

This study aims to explore the effect of competitive aggressiveness on firm performance and the moderating effect of firm 2019s ego-network structures in the international coopetition network.

From the perspective of strong cooperation of the global automobile industry in recent years, this study uses the global automobile firms in Factiva database as samples to test hypotheses using the least squares dummy variable (LSDV) model.

This study finds that there is different relationship between the number and variety of competitive actions and firm performance. In addition, ego-network structures have different coefficients for the number and variety of competitive actions.

The conclusions provide theoretical support and policy suggestions for firms to develop effective competitive strategies according to ego-network structures in the international coopetition network.

This paper aims to propose a new model and examine how night market entrepreneurs have achieved a competitive advantage in strongly competitive markets.

Two statistics methods, multiple regression analysis and structural equation models (SEM), were used to test the hypotheses for a sample of 346 vendor cases.

The results indicate that competitive aggressiveness and being proactive are positively related to risk-taking among night market vendors, which, in turn, has a positive effect on innovativeness. Further, the findings also indicate that risk-taking positively influences innovativeness and, in a mediating role, also affects competitive advantages through innovativeness.

Results of this study suggest that if night market entrepreneurs demonstrate innovativeness, positively develop new products and new services and attract customers to buy them, then they will have unique and attractiveness in the night markets, thus giving themselves relative competitive advantage.

This research is the first comprehensive examination of entrepreneurship among night market entrepreneurs to study the competitive advantages of different facets, which may provide a benchmark for future studies.

This study aims to examine the mediating role of internationalization in the relationship between the dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and performance, empirical study of small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) in a developing nation.

The study uses a sample of 158 exporting SMEs based in the sub-Saharan developing economy, Ghana. The use of hierarchical regression (ordinary least square analysis) was used by the researcher to assess the suggested model of the study.

Largely supporting the conjectural predictions, the study indicates that EO positively and significantly influences performance; internationalization fully mediates the relationship between innovativeness and performance of export firms; internationalization fully mediates the relationship between risk-taking and performance of export firms; and finally, internationalization partially mediates the relationship between competitive aggressiveness and performance of export firms. Managers are, therefore, encouraged to strategically develop both their EO and internationalization, as the study has confirmed that EO has both a direct and indirect relationship with performance.

This study integrated a resource-based view of the firm and international entrepreneurship theory as a theoretical foundation. Theoretically, internationalization’s mediating role reveals the relevance of this construct in the linkage between entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance. Furthermore, the study extends the entrepreneurial orientation concept to the international business literature by estimating and testing models of the mediating link between entrepreneurial orientation and performance. Moreover, the study seeks to broaden the knowledge of entrepreneurial orientation and its relationship with performance in small and medium businesses. The study further extends the limited studies on performance, driven by entrepreneurial orientation and internationalization in a developing nation (Ghanaian) context. This paper besides seeks to highlight the impact of entrepreneurial orientation on performance when channeled through internationalization. The study also reveals the dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation to be important antecedents of internationalization, in attempts at unearthing the critical predictors of firm performance, especially those of international characteristics.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of a firm’s entrepreneurial proclivity on market performance for large, publicly traded US firms. This study draws upon the five-dimensional view of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and develops hypotheses aimed at understanding the effects of direct effect of CE cues of proactiveness, autonomy, innovativeness, competitive aggressiveness and risk-taking on stock performance during earnings conference calls.

The entrepreneurial orientation of 339 firm post-earnings announcement conference calls is analyzed through a content analysis of transcripts, and the impact of CE cues on stock price is measured using event-study methodology.

The results suggest that the cueing the CE dimensions of innovativeness, risk-taking and especially autonomy have a positive effect on market performance during conference calls, while competitive aggressiveness has a negative effect. No effect was found for proactiveness.

The effect of entrepreneurial proclivity on firm value is not uniform. Not all dimensions of CE have a positive effect on market performance at a corporate level, and measuring each dimension of CE separately may be a valuable approach for future research.

Firms may create more value when they cue specific entrepreneurial attributes, and cueing competitive aggressiveness may not be desirable.

This study fills a gap in the literature by measuring the direct effect of CE cues on market performance through an innovative research design which relies on computer-aided text analysis.

Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, the study aims to develop a holistic conceptual model to examine the nexus between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and innovation performance (INPF) of social enterprises in an emerging economy, Ghana.

A quantitative research approach was used to collect and analyse 206 usable survey questionnaires through structural equation modelling-partial least square.

Results demonstrate that all the dimensions of EO – innovativeness, proactiveness, autonomy, risk-taking and competitive aggressiveness significantly influence the INPF of social enterprises. However, a paired t-test analysis shows that risk-taking has the largest effect size, followed by innovativeness, proactiveness, autonomy and competitive aggressiveness, in that order. The results highlight that social enterprises must exploit EO as a strategic asset in their corporate strategies and initiatives to realize competitive advantage and enhance INPF.

This study makes an incremental contribution to the extant literature by examining the impact of EO on INPF of social enterprises; it thus extends the EO framework from the conservative entrepreneurship context to the social entrepreneurship context, thereby advancing our understanding of the development and application of the EO framework in the social entrepreneurship context in emerging economies. The study concludes with the theoretical and managerial implications of the findings.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) purportedly enhances a firm's competitive edge, but its alignment with specific dimensions of manufacturing flexibility has not been convincingly documented. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of several identifiable aspects of EO on particular types of manufacturing flexibility.

Using the data collected from 115 motherboard manufacturers, the study employs multiple regression analysis to examine the effects of entrepreneurial practices on manufacturing flexibility.

The statistical results lead to the following conclusions: autonomy, innovativeness, risk‐taking and proactiveness have significant positive effects on new product flexibility; autonomy, innovativeness, and competitive aggressiveness improve product mix flexibility; innovativeness, proactiveness, and competitive aggressiveness determine volume flexibility.

The research focuses exclusively on external manufacturing flexibility, ignoring, for the time being, internal manufacturing flexibility factors.

The outcomes of the present study reveal that manufacturing flexibility cannot be achieved by simply installing a computer‐aided system; rather, it needs to be planned, managed, and integrated with a firm's entrepreneurial endeavors.

This is the first empirical study to investigate the effects of EO on manufacturing flexibility rather than on business performance, which most of the previous research on this topic has emphasized. In terms of practical applicability, the findings provide plant managers with valuable guidelines for improving manufacturing flexibility by undertaking appropriate entrepreneurial action.

This paper aims to take a disaggregated approach to investigate the relationships between single entrepreneurial orientation (EO) dimensions and firm performance in the wine industry, with the generally established positive relationship between aggregated EO dimensions and firm performance.

Literature review, field studies, pilot tests, survey and structural equation modelling were used to build hypotheses and to test these hypotheses.

Proactiveness was identified to be the predominant EO dimension that contributed most to winery market performance. Entrepreneurial opportunity perception, however, was found to positively mediate the risk taking–winery market performance relationship, while negatively mediating the competitive aggressiveness–winery market performance relationship. The authors found no innovativeness and autonomy winery market performance relationships.

First, as with much survey-based research, the study relied upon self-report measures and there was only a 12.4 per cent response rate. Second, we used Australian wine industry cross-sectional data in the research. Third, this research used conceptual measures of market performance including sales growth, market share growth, profitability and customer retention. Fourth, while the present research investigated the mediating effects of entrepreneurial opportunity perception to introduce new wine styles/services into national and/or international markets, additional research could explore the same questions in the context of some specific types of entrepreneurial opportunity perceptions.

The research adds evidence to the ongoing debate about whether there are five or three EO dimensions by examining five EO dimensions and their individual relationships with firm market performance. This research meets Miller’s (2011) call for research on the disaggregation of EO components, in particular, research contexts. This research contributes to the limited empirical research on entrepreneurial opportunity perception. This research also has important practical implications for practitioners and government.

This paper aims to investigate the effects of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) on the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with mediating role of differentiation strategy in Pakistan.

A theoretical framework has been developed to base the hypotheses, as also to determine the exact approach in this study. To establish the influence of EO on the performance of SME, a five-point Likert scale questionnaire has been used to collect data from middle and senior managers who operate in SMEs in the manufacturing sectors. The sample illustrates 166 incumbents, comprising 68.07 per cent from middle management and 31.93 per cent from senior management operating in manufacturing sector of SMEs, by means of a stratified random sampling technique. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS and Amos graphics software. Hypotheses were tested by using structural equation modeling (SEM) technique.

EO, as a whole, presents a significant positive effect on the performance of SMEs. Moreover, differentiation strategy partially mediated the relationship between EO and performance of SMEs. Two dimensions of EO, proactiveness and risk-taking propensity, strongly increased firm performance while innovativeness, competitive aggressiveness, autonomy and competitive energy did not cause any significant change. The findings differ from the current view of western enterprises that innovativeness (INO) played a major role by increasing performance of SMEs. The results transpired that innovativeness (INO) tends to reduce performance of SMEs, but the p-value did not reach a high significance value.

The main limitation of this empirical study is comparatively a small size of the sample. The analysis of power suggests that a larger sample could have provided more reliable and extensive results. Regardless of that, the analysis of reliability, using the Cronbach's alpha, exhibited the consistency of outcomes in providing an accurate portrait of the EO influences on the performance of SME.

The study verifies that two dimensions of EO have considerable effects on the performance of SMEs, while the others have not, whereas, the EO, as whole, has significant positive effect on performance of SMEs. These findings should be helpful for researchers looking for appropriate performance measures, and for entrepreneurs aiming at getting support for their decisions and evaluating their performance.

The current study appears to be first of its kind focusing on the link between EOs, as whole, and its dimensions, to performance of SMEs and differentiation strategies within the specific context of Pakistan.