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The purpose of this paper is to shift the idea of competitive strategy from the for-profit to the non-profit context and to explain how social enterprises (SEs) get advantages over competitors within and outside the social sector.

Based upon a sample of 63 SEs located in Greece, the exploratory research employs factor analysis to answer which strategic options they have to compete. Subsequent analysis of variance and correlation analysis were performed to answer if competitive strategic options relate to impact SEs generate.

The empirical findings identify and empirically validate a variety of strategic options based on four pure (low cost, low cost sustainability, low cost focus and differentiation focus) and one hybrid (efficient differentiation) types of competitive advantage. Additional evidence shows that hybrid compared to pure strategic options link more influentially to impact in terms of positive environmental, social and economic contributions.

Apart from providing some explanations of how mission-driven businesses compete, it helps widening the debate of pure vs hybrid strategies beyond the commercial sector. Contrary to what the authors already know, the evidence presented here shows that strategic purity and hybridization co-exist in the social sector.

This is the first study with empirical evidence on competitive strategies from businesses in the third sector emphasizing how SEs ensure competitive advantage along with impact potential. Consequently, the authors respond to recent calls for more survey-based, quantitative evidence in the social entrepreneurship field.

The aim of this paper is to classify firms according to dimensions of product innovativeness (PI) and identify differences in performance on the product and the firm basis in the context of SMEs.

To answer the questions this empirical study raises, a sample of 128 SMEs is clustered on the basis of the PI construct. After validating the clusters, an analysis of variance is performed to detect differences, if any, across performance measures on PI profiles of SMEs.

This paper provides evidence in support of three groups featuring different levels of PI, namely the straight imitators (low PI), the product innovators (high PI) and the concept innovators (medium PI). Further, it shows that these groups demonstrate differences in their performance potential at the product but not at the firm level.

This paper refers to an empirical study of SMEs in a European Union (EU) member state since 1981, namely Greece, which is far from restricted to the evidence provided herein. Further research is needed to confirm and extend the present results by replicating the principal features of this study with SMEs in countries within the EU, especially small ones.

The identification of successful PI profiles could become a major challenge to the management of SMEs. At a national context, this identification could direct efforts in designing different supportive actions for different groups of SMEs according to their PI profiles within the wider EU innovation policy initiatives.

The paper provides insights into supportive actions for different groups of SMEs according to their PI profiles.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically whether a hybrid, compared with other forms of competitive advantage, contributes to better business performance.

Based on 105 food manufacturing firms in Greece, a European Union (EU) member state, this study performs a factor analysis, a cluster analysis and an analysis of variance.

This study provides evidence in favour of the hybrid as the best‐performing form of competitive advantage for Greek food firms. Specifically, the findings show pure (the cost‐based nichers: 36 firms), combined (the hybridists: 49 firms) and stuck‐in‐the‐middle (the confused strategists: 20 firms) strategic alternatives that differ in terms of performance.

Research on Porter's dominant paradigm within Europe is surprisingly limited. Given the call for further research on competitive strategy to focus on European firms, this Greek study extends Porter's original model and represents one of the few studies to examine the relationship between hybrid strategies and performance.

Managers should keep in mind that hybrid strategies are usually better and never worse than pure and stuck‐in‐the‐middle alternatives. Emphasis on all dimensions of the hybrid form may be a safe and rewarding option for Greek food players to compete at home against global players.

This study provides new evidence on hybrid strategies within Europe, a subject that lacks sufficient foundation. Despite the contradictory results obtained elsewhere on the Porter‐based perspective since 1980, the empirical evidence within a European country, Greece, suggests a pleasant surprise.

This article aims to describe the valuable work conducted most recently on competitive strategies. Its purpose is to elaborate on suggestions for theorizing the hybrid form of competitive advantage and stimulate the interest of scholars.

As this article emphasizes hybrid strategies, both electronic and manual methods have detected 15 studies focusing on competitive strategies and their relation to firm performance from 2000 until today.

This article underlines the need to deal more thoroughly with combined-emphasis competitive strategies, which have seriously enhanced Porter’s paradigm, defined in 1980 with three single-emphasis strategic choices. The era in which combining competitive strategies was synonymous with stuck-in-the-middle alternatives has been left behind, and the era in which hybrid strategies suggest the most attractive choices, at least in some circumstances, has already begun.

This article is one of the few stressing conceptual issues of hybrid strategies that emerged from Porter’s (1980) model. No matter how many years pass by, research on competitive strategies will continue, as it considers businesses of any age, size, sector or country. The global challenge of today is how scholars will revise theory to better capture reality. This article intensifies the need for a theoretical framework embracing the full variety of competitive strategies, namely, single-emphasis, mixed-emphasis, no-distinctive-emphasis and stuck-in-the-middle. Nonetheless, due to their complex and multidimensional nature, hybrid strategies receive particular attention.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine different types of service firms, featuring strategy orientations and the performance of different emphases.

To answer the questions the paper raises, data of 80 Greek firms of the services sector are analysed with the help of factor analysis, cluster analysis and analysis of variance.

The findings reveal three types of firms pursuing different strategy orientations for dealing with competition (i.e. the hybridists: 44 firms, the confused strategists: 25 firms and the non‐strategists: 11 firms). Furthermore, they suggest that performance is dependent on these strategy types.

The study provides new evidence outside the manufacturing industry and the US context, which dominates the literature. Nonetheless, further empirical research will help to generalise the findings within the services sector in Greece and/or comparable national contexts, especially within the European Union.

The empirical results highlight the discussion of pure vs hybrid forms of competitive advantage pursued by service firms operating at home. A message of the utmost importance for practitioners is that the hybrid form of competitive advantage, which places high emphasis on low cost, is the prevailing and the best‐performing strategic choice.

The study focuses on strategy types of firms to offer a view on the basis of competitive advantage within the services sector of a dynamic European Union member state. By excluding the well‐known pure and stuck‐in‐the‐middle alternatives, the evidence highlights the lack of a strategy and combined choices of strategic orientations, which differ in terms of performance. It appears that the dominant argument of strategic purity is not applicable to all firms in all countries.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the strategies that private fitness centres implement and to evaluate their impact on financial performance.

Based upon a sample of 151 private fitness centres in Portugal, multivariate statistics report the implemented strategies and their effect on financial performance. We applied exploratory factorial analysis as our methodology to identify the types of strategy and the ANOVA in order to verify if there are differences of financial performance in the strategies.

The results obtained demonstrate how private fitness centres implement different strategies, including: cost leadership, differentiation, focus, quality of service, combined and stuck in the middle approaches. The relationship between strategies and financial performance, private fitness centres adopting a cost leadership strategy obtain the best financial performance levels in terms of the sales variable relative to any other strategy but with the combined strategy returning a better performance in terms of the return on assets when compared with the cost leadership strategy.

The originality of this paper stems from its identification of the strategies implemented by private fitness centres, thus, just what type of strategies are in effect across the fitness industry: leadership through cost, differentiation or a focused strategy. However, in addition to ascertaining just which strategies undergo implementation, it is also pertinent in determining just which strategy drives the best financial performance for private fitness centres given that private centres may only remain in the market when achieving financial sustainability. Therefore, this paper seeks to provide information for managers as regards the strategies implemented and their impacts on the financial performance of private fitness centres.

The objective of the study is to understand the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO), employers' organizational commitment to their employees (OCE), employees' perception of the adequacy of budgetary resources (BRs), and firm performance in Malaysian and Chilean firms. A survey of 165 managers finds that EO has a significant positive relationship with performance. Additionally, the perceptions about the adequacy of the BR have a significant positive effect on performance. And in the Chilean subsample, the OCE interacts positively with perceptions of budget resource adequacy to affect the firm performance. The total effect of EO on performance is similar across both countries despite the EO being higher in Malaysia and perceptions of budget resource adequacy being higher in Chile. The study highlights the contribution to the literature on the EO – performance relationship – and emphasizes the importance of providing adequate resources to enhance the psychological safety of employees working in less developed countries.

Today, newly founded businesses are inevitably driven to start in a digital form from day 1. Moreover, most existing businesses conceive digitalization as an important part of their strategic orientation by developing and improving their digital assets and digitalizing their processes. By taking account of this development, this chapter investigates how entrepreneurial orientation (EO) affects a small firm’s proclivity to both digitization and internationalization and their performance that comes from it. Internationalization has been a key topic for many small- and medium-sized companies (SMEs) over the past decades. As digitization is currently taking over the helm from internationalization as the most pressing topic affecting business, we carried out research among SMEs to understand the interplay of these factors influencing business performance. The focus of the research was on the precursory factors inducing firm performance as well as on their interrelationships. Using a sample of 357 SMEs, EO is found to be significantly closely associated with an SME’s degree of digitization as well as with its overall performance. In contrast, EO does not affect the SME’s level of internationalization. This result is surprising considering that proactive and risk-taking firms tend to be more inclined to enter foreign and distant markets.

Business literature reveals the importance of generating innovative products and services, but much of the innovation research has been conducted in large firms and not replicated in small firms. These firms are likely to have different perspectives on innovation, which means that they will probably behave differently to large firms. Our study aims to unpack how firms in Spatial Information perceive and engage in innovation as a part of their business operation.

To investigate these questions we conduct 20 in-depth interviews of top management team members in Spatial Information firms in Australia.

We find that small firms define innovation very broadly and measure innovation by its effect on productivity or market success. Innovation is seen as crucial to survival and success in a competitive environment. Most firms engage in product and/or service innovations, while some also mentioned marketing, process and organisational innovations. Most innovations were more exploitative rather than exploratory with only a few being radical innovations. Innovation barriers include time and money constraints, corporate culture and Government tendering practices. Our study sheds a light on our understanding of innovation in an under-researched sector; that is Spatial Information industry.

This research aims to examine the moderating effect of strategic orientation on the effect of environmental uncertainties on business performance and the moderating effect of innovations on the effect of environmental uncertainties on performance of the business in the aviation industry in Indonesia.

Research data were collected in stages by means of interviews with corporate leaders of Indonesian airlines and branch managers of several airports, as well as with the Directorate of Civil Aviation as the regulator. A pre-test and focus group discussion (FGD) were conducted to directly determine the questionnaire aspects of the research object, following which an immediate revision was made to the questionnaire. The data from the survey used in each variable were obtained from the mail questionnaire survey. The data collected using the survey are the main data used in the present study.

The model of environment–strategy–performance (ESP) can work well in improving performance if supported by innovations. These findings deepen the ESP paradigm in the aviation industry (Miles and Snow, 1978; Segev 1987; Covin and Slevin, 1989; Miller and Shamsie, 1996) that during conditions of high environmental uncertainties, strategic orientation, rather than a single response, will be effective if supported by innovations that provide the strategy with flexibility. The initial implications of these modeling results generate the findings that the effect of environmental uncertainties in the aviation industry (classified as strictly regulated) on performance of a company is largely determined by the direction of the strategic orientation and the innovation level.

Interactions between innovations and environmental uncertainties have a significant negative effect on the achievement of business performance of the branches with a coefficient of 0.02 and a t-value of 2.00, meaning that the innovation level of a branch has an increasingly stronger influence on the business performance of the branch in the uncertain environment with limitations or underestimated by the branch manager or the innovation level of the branch is not supported with airport facilities and services, which means that the provision of airport facilities and services is inversely proportional to the needs of the airline branches. In other words, the variable “innovations” is a moderating variable for the effect of environmental uncertainties on business performance.

The results of the modeling performed in this research also show that innovations play a major role in the implementation of the ESP model (Blumentritt and Danis, 2006). The empirical phenomena and descriptive analysis results suggest that the Indonesian airlines which have been quite successful and have demonstrated an above-average performance possess higher levels of innovations. This finding corroborates that of previous studies that environmental uncertainties and direction of strategic orientation will determine the ability of a company to overcome the barriers to innovations, by maximizing innovative resources in achieving the target of innovations (Manu, 1992; O’Regan and Ghobadian, 2005; Hult et al., 2003), and more specifically, it indicates that strategic orientation that is prospective in nature leads to a high level of innovations (Salavou et al., 2004).

The research findings indicate that innovations have a central role in the ESP models and are able to offer a new concept as a modification of the ESP model which in the study is called ESIP. The role of innovations in the ESIP model puts innovations as a variable moderating the effect of environmental uncertainties on performance and the effect of strategic orientation on performance. Moreover, based on the summary of the results for the analysis of the ESIP model, the following can be explained: first, environmental uncertainties have a significant and positive effect on the innovation level or the higher the level of environmental uncertainties, the more is the number of the innovations that an Indonesian airline branch creates. External environmental conditions that are likely to be complex and dynamic found in the area of operations make the branch management more able to identify barriers to innovations and manage resources to be more creative and productive for the attainment of the targets of innovations.

Innovations in business models as a new effort in improvisation specific to the business stage of the basic model (not very valuable) become more advanced business processes to produce products that are more valuable for consumers, at a more efficient cost with better profitability (Chesbrough, 2007b). So far, research on the role of innovations in response to environmental uncertainties and implementation of strategies to improve the performance of the ESP model is still done partially, so that there is no comprehensive model to describe the role of innovations in this ESP model, or let us say that a gap exists between theories and opportunities to conduct further research on the role of innovations in the ESP model.