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Using arguments from the regulatory focus and upper echelons theories, this paper aims to examine the impact of a chief executive officer’s (CEO’s) regulatory foci (i.e. promotion and prevention focus) on small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs’) level of innovativeness and how these relationships are jointly moderated by intense competition.

The empirical analysis draws on survey data gathered from 257 SMEs in Ghana.

The study findings indicate that a CEO’s level of promotion focus positively affects the firm’s engagement in innovation, while a CEO’s prevention focus is negatively associated with the firm’s innovativeness. The positive association between a CEO’s promotion focus and a firm’s innovativeness is enhanced under conditions of intense competition. Additionally, the negative relationship between prevention focus and firm-level innovativeness is attenuated under intense competition.

This study relied on a single informant and also used subjective measures for the dependent variable. As such, individual respondents might have biased perspectives on firm-level product innovativeness. Future studies may use multiple informants to examine the causal links of the variables.

The study’s findings provide managers with a deeper understanding of how to achieve superior firm-level product innovation. The understanding of this issue can promote the development and maintenance of further entrepreneurial ventures in emerging economies.

The paper has a strong theoretical value as it pioneers research on the effect of CEOs’ regulatory foci on firm-level innovativeness in competitive environments.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the relationship between two business orientations, namely, entrepreneurial orientation and market orientation, and innovativeness taking into account the moderating influence of environmental munificence.

This is a multiple respondent quantitative study. A total of 312 marketing managers middle level and above from 79 firms participated in the survey. Multiple regression and hierarchical multiple regression was the method of choice for data analysis.

Findings indicate that environmental munificence moderates the entrepreneurial orientation – innovativeness relationship. Findings reveal that even though a significant impact of entrepreneurial orientation is not present on innovativeness, this insignificance may be due to environmental munificence. Market orientation has a direct positive impact on innovativeness, and environmental munificence negatively moderates this relationship suggesting that when the environment is less munificent, the market orientation – innovation link becomes stronger.

Managers should be aware that the more munificent an environment becomes, having an entrepreneurial orientation will be more important for innovativeness. In addition, results of this study suggest that being market oriented more strongly impacts a firm’s ability to innovate in non-munificent environments where growth opportunities are undesirable.

This study is unique in that it is a multi-respondent study with respondents from different layers of each participating organization, incorporating the moderating impact of the business environment’s munificence on business orientations–innovativeness relationship.

Successful firms are important sources of productivity, employment and economic stability in societies. As the micro-level origins of firm innovations are increasingly attracting attention amongst innovation scholars, the purpose of this study is to investigate the role of managerial innovativeness, i.e. small firm managers' innovative behaviour for firm performance. Specifically, the present study investigates managerial innovativeness as a predictor of small firms' product innovativeness and market performance.

This research model suggests that managerial innovativeness is positively linked to firms' market performance and that product innovativeness partially mediates the relationship between managerial innovativeness and market performance. The model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with a dataset (N = 93) collected from small logistics firms in South-Eastern Finland.

The findings support the authors' hypotheses and show that managerial innovativeness had a direct effect on firms' product innovativeness and market performance. The authors also found that firms' product innovativeness mediated the relationship between managerial innovativeness and firms' market performance.

This is one of the few studies that shed light on and show that managerial innovativeness is significantly and positively related with small firms' product innovativeness and market performance, whereas earlier research tended to focus on managers' personalities, traits, characteristics or managerial actions, leaving managerial innovativeness unexplored.

This paper aims to assess the often repeated, but empirically unconfirmed, supposition that there is a positive connection between foreign board members (FBMs) and firm innovativeness and to set a research agenda for future studies on the topic.

The analyses are based on a large sample of firms within the European Union, utilizing patent and trademark data together with information on the national diversity of the boards.

The analyses confirm that there is a positive association between FBMs and firm innovativeness. Contrary to expectations, FBMs from less innovative countries than the countries of their host companies are more associated with innovative firms than are FBMs from more innovative countries.

This study provides empirical support for propositions, drawn from resource dependency theory and group effectiveness/diversity theories, that diverse boards of directors can lead to greater firm-level creativity and innovativeness. It also outlines a detailed research agenda for future studies to build on the tentative findings presented in this paper.

The findings suggest that greater national diversity in the board of directors can enhance innovation.

Earlier studies on board diversity have not analyzed empirically the issue of national diversity. The originality of this paper lies in its attempt to address this gap in the corporate governance literature.

This study attempts to reveal product platform strategy via business-to-business (B2B) platform ecosystems. The authors advance the views of platform ecosystems in the innovation literature by introducing a contingency perspective that underscores the role of market, organizational and technological innovativeness in product platform strategy.

This study explores three contingent factors, specifically market innovativeness, technological innovativeness and organizational innovativeness that affect the product platform strategy of high-tech firms. The theoretical model is empirically validated using survey data from 191 high-tech firms.

Using a data set of high-tech manufacturing firms, the results show that product platform strategy is positively related to firm performance. Additionally, the results provide evidence supporting the positive moderating effect of the three-way interaction among market, organizational and technological innovativeness on the contribution of product platform strategy to firm performance.

A platform product strategy is a determining factor in firm performance that requires firms to have a “fit” with their innovation activities. This study contributes to theoretical development at the intersection of product platform strategy and innovativeness.

When firms seek to align their technological innovativeness with their organizational innovativeness, the benefits of such innovativeness may be more pronounced in a platform product context. Moreover, the results may help guide platform managers and decision makers in identifying and securing appropriate innovation activities to enhance product platform strategies.

This study provides a product platform strategy in B2B platform ecosystems and shows how different innovation activities interact to improve the product platform strategy.

This study presents and validates a theoretical model linking individual characteristics of the founding or lead innovative entrepreneur of a start-up venture – the entrepreneur's values, entrepreneurial attitudes and entrepreneurial self-efficacy – to the firm's entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and market orientation (MO) and, ultimately, to firm performance.

We conducted a survey on a stratified random sample of founders of early-stage South Australian micro- and small enterprises with a response rate of 24% (N = 204). Structural equation modelling was used to evaluate the model.

The study found that there is a significant relationship between the individual lead entrepreneur and firm strategies developed in early-stage firms in explaining firm performance. It also found that internal values are positively related to entrepreneurial attitude. Entrepreneurial attitude is positively related to entrepreneurial self-efficacy and EO innovativeness. In turn, entrepreneurial self-efficacy is related to innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking. The proactiveness dimension of EO and entrepreneurial attitude is related to MO. Entrepreneurial self-efficacy, innovativeness and MO are related to firm performance.

This research was limited to entrepreneurial ventures in South Australia and may lack generalisability in other states and countries.

The research contributes to the understanding of the heterogeneity within self-employed individuals, in particular among innovative entrepreneurs, by expanding insights regarding antecedents and consequences of the entrepreneurial process. It develops insights into the links of individual-level constructs with firm-level constructs to develop a more meaningful understanding of new venture creation and performance. It enhances our knowledge of the heterogeneity within the group of self-employed by exploring the individual entrepreneurial antecedents of performance in early-stage firms.

Because of the paucity of empirical research on firm-level capabilities of firms for effective customer involvement, the purpose of this study is to evaluate service firms’ capacity to coopt customers to enhance the innovativeness and firm performance relationship. This study conceptualizes involvement capabilities of service firms as a strategic driver that exploits their internal firm assets, which in turn facilitates the positive relationship between innovativeness and firm performance.

Data were collected from 344 managers of service firms across different sub-sectors in an emerging economy. The study first confirmed the constructs through confirmatory factor analysis before analyzing hypothesized relationships. Regression models were specified with robust standard errors to test the hypothesized relationships.

The study found that involvement capability of service firms helps them to exploit their relational assets and create and manage strong customer participation. Additionally, it was found that involvement capabilities enable service firms to capitalize on the competencies of customers, which in turn improves the outcomes of their innovativeness. The results showed that the interaction between involvement capability and innovativeness enhances firm performance significantly.

Service firms can enhance customer participation in the value creation process by increasing their involvement capabilities. The increase in such capabilities will enhance the innovativeness of service firms, thereby improving their financial and non-financial performance.

This study offers guidance on how a firm’s innovativeness and customer involvement work together within the service operation to enhance firm performance.

The purpose of this paper is to propose that the resources that a firm owns and has full control (firm-level resources) and resources that a firm access through direct connection with other firms (network-level resources) will impact firm innovation when effectively deployed by the firm. While previous research examined these factors separately, the author takes a holistic view and looks into their effects on innovation simultaneously. The author also introduces the moderating effects, i.e. the variables that can enhance firm innovation through their interaction with internal and external resources.

The author tested the role of financial resources and slack resources in the form of cash slack and human slack at the firm level, and network size, network tie strength, and network diversity at the network level on the firm innovation. Using generalized negative binomial model with Huber-White procedure, the author analyzed 306 firms from the biotechnology industry over a span of 17 years.

The analysis suggests that cash slack impact innovation negatively. However, this link is moderated by firm size such that for large firms cash slack affects innovation positively. Network-level resources all positively impact innovation and have more economic impact on firm innovation than firm-level resources. Furthermore, although human slack negatively affects innovation, its interaction with network size enhances innovation.

The research makes important contributions to both strategic management and innovation literatures especially when, the author considers the role of firm-level slack in driving firm innovation. Previous research reported conflicting findings about the availability of slack resources and firm performance. The results showed that the relationship between slack resources and firm innovation is negative and significant, both for available slack and human slack. This finding parallels with previous research which reported that constraints such as lack of slack resources can actually facilitate innovation. The author also contributes to the literature by introducing boundary conditions which can enhance firm innovation through their interaction with firm-level internal and network-level external resources. In this respect, to the author’s knowledge, this is among the first studies to combine the slack literature focusing on firm-level resources with the literature on network-level resources.

Ever since Sarasvathy’s (2001) seminal article, scholars have sought to test effectuation’s affect on firm performance. Although recent work has begun the arduous process of testing effectuation’s effect on entrepreneurial performance, there is still much to learn about its impact on firm performance. One such area is the relationship between effectuation and innovation. The purpose of this paper is to first, propose a scale suitable to the explication of the effectuation construct relative to innovation. Second, it proposes a more parsimonious scale for the measurement of innovation. Third, these scales are tested relative to firm performance.

This paper develops and tests a structural model, which investigates aspects of effectuation as mediators between innovation orientation and product/service innovation. This is accomplished using a sample of 169 electronic product manufacturing-based small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Subjective measures of performance are used as the dependent variable.

The three most widely used measures of innovativeness were found to break cleanly into two sub-constructs, namely innovation orientation and product/service innovation. Effectuation measures included means (who I know), leverage contingencies (experimentation), pre-commitments and affordable loss. Means and leverage contingencies were found to positively mediate innovation orientation and product/service innovation leading to increased firm performance. Affordable loss did not show a mediating role, but had a direct effect on firm performance.

This study establishes two distinct sub-constructs of firm-level innovation; namely innovation orientation and product/service innovation. Second, by testing an innovation-centric effectuation model, this research establishes an empirical relationship between effectuation, innovation and firm performance.

Practical implications include establishing a relationship between means, leverage contingencies and innovation-performance, indicating that the ways through which small and medium-sized enterprises use their innovation networks may affect innovation outcomes and ultimately firm performance.

This research establishes an empirical relationship between effectuation, innovation and firm performance, extending effectuation theory from the entrepreneurship to the innovation literature.

This paper aims to examine brand innovativeness. While innovativeness has been studied at the product and firm levels, there is little research at the brand level. This paper argues for why this is needed, develops a conceptualization of consumer perceived brand innovativeness (CPBI) from a theoretical perspective and then develops and validates a measure for CPBI.

Three qualitative studies were conducted to generate an enriched and more detailed understanding of what brand innovativeness means to consumers. Data were collected using free association and open-ended elicitation techniques. Next, a CPBI scale was developed and validated in three quantitative studies.

The results indicate that innovative brands are related with several interesting core and secondary associations that have not been adequately addressed in previous research. CPBI is conceptualized as a unidimensional construct. Altogether six studies show that the proposed CPBI measure is valid and reliable.

The present study is the first to identify the limitations of product and firm innovativeness conceptualizations with regards to brand innovativeness. It develops a unique and theoretically supported conceptualization and operationalization of CPBI. The first brand concept map for the concept of innovative brands is presented. The results of the studies indicate the measure’s ability to successfully predict important consumer behavior variables such as purchase intentions, and to demonstrate superior predictive performance compared with a key related scale in the mobile phone category.