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Studies concentrating on digitalization and interconnected capabilities have increased over the past several decades. Digitalization capability and open innovation are perceived as sources of sustained competitiveness across disciplines. This study investigated how digitalization capability and coopetition strategy affect the sustainable performance of firms by exploring the role of internal and external factors in influencing the adoption and success of open innovation in emerging markets.

To test the hypothesis, the authors conducted a structural equation model analysis on 509 firm datasets from the hub cities in China, an innovative battlefield where multilateral cooperation and competition are interwoven for globalization, clean development and the enhancement of economic growth.

The authors found that a firm's digitalization capability positively impacts outbound/inbound open innovation, coopetition strategy and sustainable performance. This study’s results support a series of mediating effects through outbound/inbound open innovation and coopetition strategy. Also, it provides a nuanced understanding of how digitalization capability and open innovation can affect sustainable performance in emerging markets.

The present study provides a nuanced understanding of how digitalization capability and in/out-bound open innovation can affect sustainable performance in emerging markets. The authors believe this model contributes to current knowledge by filling several research gaps, and this study’s findings offer valuable and practical implications for achieving open innovation and creating sustainable performance.

This study aims to examine the impact of COVID-19 on tourism and hospitality small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in an emerging country located in Latin America and identifies service innovation strategies adopted by these firms to survive a prolonged crisis.

A qualitative investigation was conducted drawing on a framework of imposed service innovation. Data were obtained from in-depth interviews with owners/managers of 20 SMEs in the hospitality and tourism sector in Chile.

Findings show that the effect of COVID-19 on SMEs includes a decline in demand due to lockdowns and restrictions, with minimal government support. Tourism and hospitality SMEs developed different service innovation strategies to confront the crisis, and several businesses were even able to exploit new opportunities for future growth.

The effect of COVID-19 and SMEs' service innovation strategies to confront a prolonged crisis is a topic that is largely unexplored, particularly in the tourism and hospitality sector. The findings contribute to the literature on emerging markets, crisis management and SME innovation in tourism and hospitality. The findings provide managerial implications for SME managers, governments and policymakers.

This study examines the role of social media adoption (SMA), opportunity recognition (OR) and opportunity exploitation (OE) in mediating the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and the performance of newly established small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies, with a particular emphasis on Ghana.

This study adopts a post-positivist philosophical stance and uses a quantitative approach and a survey design. A purposive sampling technique was used to select 336 SME owners and managers from Ghana’s manufacturing, trading and service sectors. Questionnaires were administered to source the empirical data for this study. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to analyse the proposed hypotheses.

The results reveal that EO positively and significantly influences the performance of new-born SMEs. SMA, OR and OE partially mediated this relationship.

This study is a wakeup call to policymakers, practitioners, managers and owners of recently established businesses. Policymakers should provide support and resources for newly established SMEs to adopt effective social media marketing strategies, bolstering their online presence and customer engagement. Simultaneously, they should invest in entrepreneurship education and create an environment conducive to innovation to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset among fresh SMEs. Business owners and managers should proactively monitor market trends and consumer preferences, adapting their strategies to identifying and seizing emerging opportunities.

This study introduces a significant novelty to previous literature and one of the first to employ the dynamic capability theory to examine the interplay between EO, SMA, OR and OE in influencing the performance of new SMEs in the context of emerging markets. Furthermore, it extends the scope of understanding of the mechanisms through which SMEs can prosper in these dynamic environments. This unique combination of theoretical framework, comprehensive variables and contextual focus sets this study apart from existing research, enriching the literature on SME performance in emerging markets.

This paper aims to elucidate the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation, reverse innovation and international performance of emerging economy multinational enterprises (EMNEs).

The authors analyze archival data of Chinese limited companies between 2010 and 2016, including 11,230 firm-year observations about 1708 firms. In order to test the study’s mediation hypotheses, the authors apply an ordinary least square (OLS) regression.

The authors find evidence that the entrepreneurial orientation of EMNEs has a positive effect on reverse innovations. Furthermore, the authors find positive effects of reverse innovation on the international performance of EMNEs. This pattern of results suggests that the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and international performance is partially mediated by reverse innovation.

The study’s findings help managers in EMNEs to promote reverse innovation by building and using their entrepreneurial orientation. It also helps them to set out and gauge the chances of success of their internationalization strategies. The findings also hold relevance for firms in developed economies as well, as they may understand which emerging economy competitors stand to threaten their positions.

The strategic role of reverse innovations – i.e. clean slate, super value and technologically advanced products originating from emerging markets – has generated considerable research attention. It is clear that reverse innovations impact the international performance of EMNEs. Yet how entrepreneurial orientation influences international performance is still underexplored. Thus, the current study clarifies the mechanism by examining and testing the mediating role of reverse innovation among the entrepreneurial orientation–international performance link.

The post-pandemic emerging market is competitive and green, which has contributed to the growing pressure on firms to adopt into their business models green strategies with competitive outcomes. Therefore, this paper aims to draw from the natural resource-based view (NRBV) theory to examine how green intellectual capital (IC) can influence green competitive advantage of manufacturing firms in Ghana, by elucidating the mediating role of eco-innovation speed and quality in the relationship.

Cross-sectional survey data were obtained from 212 manufacturing firms in Ghana, using purposive sampling techniques. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to determine the factor structure of the measurement models. Structural equation modelling technique was used to analyse the hypothesized relationships.

The study found that green IC has a positively significant effect on green competitive advantage of manufacturing firms. However, while eco-innovation speed positively mediates the relationship, eco-innovation quality plays a negative mediating role in the effect of green IC on green competitive advantage of manufacturing firms in Ghana.

The framework of this study provides to managers of manufacturing firms, a superior green strategy that is unique, valuable and non-substitutable with the capable to provide green competitive edge to firms in a turbulent sustainability-driven market.

Through the lens of the NRBV theory, this study provided a firstly knowledge on the crucial role of eco-innovation speed and quality in driving firms’ green competitive advantage within a post-covid emerging market.

The present study aims to examine the relationships between digital business transformation, organizational learning, frugal innovation and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) resilience in emerging markets.

Empirical data collection has been implemented using a questionnaire method from 214 owners and managers of SMEs. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach was used to examine the measurement model and test hypotheses.

The results show that digital business transformation significantly impacts frugal innovation and SMEs' resilience in emerging markets. They also confirm the significant impact of frugal innovation on SMEs' resilience. Furthermore, the results revealed that organizational learning significantly impacts digital business transformation, frugal innovation and SMEs' resilience.

This study provides novel insights into the existing theories and literature regarding the determinants of SMEs' resilience in emerging markets. It also provides practical contributions, confirming the SMEs' need to develop their dynamic capabilities, including digital transformation, frugal innovation and organizational learning to maintain their resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review of literature on corporate engagement with start-ups (CEWS) by identifying the modes, contexts, antecedents, barriers and outcomes. As an emerging field, CEWS presently has no such review available which will help in building consensus within the field and shape future research directions.

The study followed a two-phased systematic review of literature. Three research databases (i.e. Web of Science, ScienceDirect and SCOPUS) were accessed to gather and conduct the review. Of the total 379 papers retrieved, 63 total relevant papers were studied and analysed. The exhaustive review of literature helped to uncover the contexts, perspectives, antecedents, outcomes and barriers reported across the different modes of CEWS.

The study highlighted the five prominent modes of CEWS favoured by large corporations and start-ups. It found that the large corporations and start-ups associate with one another on the basis of complementarities of activities, resources and motives to pursue their strategic orientations. The engagements also face barriers on the ground, such as incompatibility of goals, power imbalances, cultural differences and weak engagement plans. Most important contexts seen were the high-technology industries in the developed economies like the USA and Europe. It also found that ecosystem creation, accessing innovation and corporate strategy have been preferred as the most productive modes of CEWS in the literature.

This review provides practitioners with a detailed list of the modes and drivers of CEWS. Subsequently, the barriers that need to be managed to successfully execute a specific mode of engagement. This shall enable the practitioners in developing and adopting the best practices while engaging with the start-ups to better facilitate the outcomes of CEWS.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no systematic literature review available in the domain of CEWS – thus, this study makes an important methodological contribution to the field. By consolidating the fragmented yet growing knowledge on CEWS, the study presents a detailed understanding of what drives and obstructs the engagement between large corporations and start-ups.

While previous research has demonstrated the positive effects of digital business strategies on operational efficiency, financial performance and value creation, little is known about how such strategies influence innovation performance. To address the gap, this paper aims to investigate the impact of a firm’s digital business strategy on its innovation performance.

Drawing on the dynamic capability view, this study examines the mechanism through which a digital business strategy affects innovation performance. Data were collected from 215 firms in China and analyzed using multiple regression and structural equation modeling.

The empirical analysis reveals that a firm’s digital business strategy has positive impacts on both product and process innovation performance. These impacts are partially mediated by knowledge-based dynamic capability. Additionally, a firm’s digital business strategy interacts positively with its entrepreneurial orientation in facilitating knowledge-based dynamic capability. Moreover, market turbulence enhances the strength of this interaction effect. Therefore, entrepreneurial-oriented firms operating in turbulent markets can benefit more from digital business strategies to enhance their knowledge-based dynamic capabilities and consequently improve their innovation performance.

This study contributes to the understanding of how a firm’s digital business strategy interacts with entrepreneurial orientation in turbulent markets to shape knowledge-based dynamic capability, which in turn enhances the firm’s innovation performance.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between nonmarket strategy and innovation performance, as well as the boundary factors that influence this relationship in the context of the pharmaceutical industry in emerging markets.

This study analyzed matched data of 227 Chinese pharmaceutical firms and two secondary databases with SPSS to examine the hypotheses.

Nonmarket strategy promotes the innovation performance. High level of firm internal knowledge utilization ability and strategic flexibility strengthens the effect of nonmarket strategy in promoting innovation performance, while information technology (IT) environment weakens the effect of nonmarket strategy in promoting innovation performance.

The research studies the positive impact of nonmarket strategy on innovation performance in the specific context of Chinese pharmaceutical industry, and it introduces the internal capabilities and external IT environment of the firm as moderators of the relationship between nonmarket strategy and innovation performance. More importantly, this research echoes the call for research on moderator of nonmarket strategy and identifies important boundary conditions. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it also explores the impact of the IT environment on the implementation of nonmarket strategy for the first time, which deepens the research on nonmarket strategy’s effect on innovation.

Chinese firms are winning market share from foreign multinational enterprises in domestic markets. The international business literature suggests that this is happening because these firms are developing non-traditional firm-specific advantages (FSAs). Strategic factor market (SFM) theory provides a good basis for explaining how this is happening. However, it is underdeveloped in terms of analysing unique resources and unique access to those resources by Chinese firms in their domestic markets. This paper aims to develop a framework to understand how Chinese firms have developed non-traditional FSAs.

The case study method is adopted to explore how Chinese firms develop non-traditional FSAs. Specifically, the authors compare paired case studies of a Chinese firm and a foreign multinational in each of two industries.

The authors find that Chinese firms have developed non-traditional FSAs because of more relevant experience, better adapted strategies and privileged relationships. This has enabled Chinese firms to develop non-traditional FSAs.

The authors propose a framework that conceptualises non-traditional FSA development in Chinese firms as a product of superior access to unique and valuable resources in their domestic SFMs.