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Managing resources is crucial for firms to gain competitive advantages and succeed, particularly for startups with limited resources. It is important to understand how digital startups in general and digital academic spin-offs (ASOs) in particular may orchestrate their resources to optimize value. This paper integrates the resource-based perspective with digital entrepreneurship to analyze the resource configurations leading to success of digital ASOs.

The paper adopts an inductive approach and applies qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) on a longitudinal dataset of digital ASOs to identify the resource configurations for a successful outcome.

The authors' paper identifies two main paths to success among digital ASOs, consisting of five distinct resource configurations. The first path is termed “market exploiters” that operate in favorable market conditions where specific technological resources and research collaboration resources are lacking. The second path involves “technology explorers” that combines both technological and commercial resources to achieve success.

By outlining distinct pathways to the success of digital ASOs, this paper contributes to the digital academic entrepreneurship literature and the resource-based view of entrepreneurial firms. The paper also suggests implications for policymakers and managers in managing resources for the success of digital ventures.

By exploring the resource configurations leading to the success of ASOs commercializing digital technologies, the paper shows that favorable market conditions and complementary resource configurations can be alternative pathways to success.

This paper, anchored in the resource‐based view of the firm, attempts to develop linkages between firm‐level resources, Porter's competitive strategy space and firm performance and explores them in the context of a new industry – the marketing technology industry.

In the marketing technology industry the authors classify resource configurations (generalists, specialists, innovators) which group firms with distinctive competences on similar resource dimensions. They then map these firm‐level resource configurations onto their respective optimal strategies in the industry's competitive strategy space.

The major findings are: some firms that are close together in strategy space vary in performance; some firms that are close together in strategy space belong to quite different resource configurations; firms that belong to the same resource configuration (i.e. are close together in resource space and distant from others) vary in performance; given the origin (i.e. resource configuration) of a new entrant there exists an optimal strategy that can be theoretically defined; and corresponding to each resource configuration there seems to exist a unique optimal region in strategy space.

It is one of few attempts to empirically explore the parallels between firm level resource‐based and industry level competitive strategies.

Developing and implementing strategies to maximize profitability is a fundamental challenge facing manufacturers. The complexity of orchestrating resources in practice has been overlooked in the operations field and it is now necessary to go beyond the direct effects of individual resources and uncover different resource configurations that maximize profitability. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Drawing on a sample of US manufacturing firms, multiple regression analysis (MRA) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) are performed to examine the effects of resource orchestration on firm profitability over time. By comparing the findings between analyses, the study represents a move away from examining the net effects of resource levers on performance alone.

The findings characterize the resource conditions for manufacturers’ high performance, and also for absence of high performance. Pension and retirement expense is a core resource condition with R&D and SG&A as consistent peripheral conditions for profitability. Moreover, although workforce size was found to have a significant negative effect under MRA, this plays a role in manufacturers’ performance as a peripheral resource condition under fsQCA.

Accounting for different resource deployment configurations, this study deepens knowledge of resource orchestration and presents findings that enable manufacturers to maximize profitability. An empirical contribution is offered by the introduction of a new method for examining manufacturing strategy configurations: fsQCA.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

Pervasive computing envisions seamless support for user tasks through cooperating devices that are present in an environment. Fluctuating availability of devices, induced by mobility and failures, requires mechanisms and algorithms that allow applications to adapt to their ever‐changing execution environments without user intervention. To ease the development of adaptive applications, Becker et al. (3) have proposed the peer‐based component system PCOM. This system provides fundamental mechanisms to support the automated composition of applications at runtime. In this article, we discuss the requirements on algorithms that enable automatic configuration of pervasive applications. Furthermore, we show how finding a configuration can be interpreted as Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem. Based on this, we present an algorithm that is capable of finding an application configuration in the presence of strictly limited resources. To show the feasibility of this algorithm, we present an evaluation based on simulations and real‐world measurements and we compare the results with a simple greedy approximation.

Sustainable Family Business Theory states that human, social, and financial capital are important for new family venture growth, yet there may be multiple combinations that could be beneficial. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether all three types of resources are always needed for growth.

Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, a configurational method, is used to investigate which combinations of human, social, and financial capital consistently lead to new family venture growth.

Multiple distinct combinations of resources – usually containing some form of human capital along with either social or financial capital – were sufficient for new family ventures to grow.

The findings contribute to a more accurate Sustainable Family Business Theory in terms of the resource bundles needed to achieve growth. Not all three primary resources are needed at founding for the venture to grow. Results suggest a need for renewed focus on human capital in family venture research, as well as further investigations of the resource configurations uncovered here and their effects on family firm outcomes.

Given the costs associated with acquiring resources, the findings can inform family entrepreneurs and other stakeholders purposed with assisting new family ventures regarding optimal avenues of achieving growth.

This study advances theory by demonstrating which combinations of primary resources lead to new family venture growth. The findings shed light on how human, social, and financial capital may substitute for each other, as well as how the value of each depends on the presence or absence of the others.

Environmental volatility is a central construct in strategy studies. This paper argues that three factors confound the literature on volatility: asymmetry in conceptualization, asymmetry in operationalization, and lack of attention to level of analysis. These limitations inhibit the development of the concept and make much of the research on volatility non‐additive. However, environments do matter and to make better sense of it we need a meta‐conceptualization. To do this, the paper presents a process‐based resources‐oriented view of volatility that argues that the volatility experienced by the firm is largely a function of the resources it has available to meet the demands made of it. It is proposed that volatility originates from four basic resource configurations: managerial‐human resources configuration, physical resources‐conversion configuration, intangible resources configuration, and positional configuration. Propositions consistent with prior theories and incorporating the new resources‐oriented viewpoint are presented and discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate which resources and capabilities are most important to enable large manufacturers undergoing servitization to develop and deliver successful services.

A survey of 155 UK-based manufacturers provided the basis for the study. Data analysis was undertaken using confirmatory factor analysis and multiple regression.

In total, five constructs (“resource configurations”) which enable the development and delivery of successful services and a construct to measure services performance (“Success of Services”) were developed from the literature. A measurement model based on these constructs was empirically tested and verified. Two resource configurations; “Leaders and Services Personnel” and “Services Methods and Tools” were found to make a unique and statistically significant contribution to “Success of Services.”

The study highlights the importance of corporates leaders and service employees in developing and delivering success. Service-specific methods and tools are important for developing compelling customer offerings. The study demonstrates the utility of a resource-based perspective in terms of understanding the factors that enable successful services, but also exposes the limitations of using such broad measures, with common lower order resources underpinning multiple resource configurations. The study was conducted from the manufacturer’s perspective, and future studies could also include the customer’s perspective.

The research identifies important factors in developing a greater service orientation in manufacturing companies.

This is one of the first studies to develop and test a model of services success, generalizable to the population of large manufacturers.

Previous studies have suggested that one may trace the factors (i.e. sources of the competitive advantage) that cause the firm performance by examining the performance itself. Financial ratios have been used to trace the sources of competitive advantage, that is, the resource configuration, but the key resources driving superior performance remained undiscovered. The present study seeks to reduce the number of dimensions in the resource configuration to a two‐dimensional map to capture firms' relative resource positions and identify the resources and capabilities that lead to the superior performance.

Factor analysis is used to extract the resource bundles and management capabilities of the online game industry in Taiwan from financial ratios included in the expanded Du Pont identity. These resource and capability bundles are subsequently verified by discriminant analysis to distinguish firms with competitive advantage from firms with competitive disadvantage. Factor scores are then used as inputs for multidimensional scaling to draw the resource positioning of the competitive firms.

The competitive advantage of online firms can be determined using two dimensions of intellectual property and relationship assets. In addition, firms with advantage in upstream (game developers) and downstream (channels) relationships perform better than other firms.

Private online game firms are excluded from the empirical study because their financial data are not available.

Using financial ratios, the present research identified the resource and capability bundles essential to the superior performance of the online game firms.

Highlighting the important role of managerial action in resource orchestration, the purpose of this paper is to explore how differences in managerial perceptions about the strategic relevance of resources and capabilities influences the resource configurations in SMEs from an emerging economy context.

Using a survey-based instrument that was developed by the Global Competitive project (www.gcp.org), the authors identify 62 Mexican SMEs and perform a cluster analysis based on firm size and age and estimate the competitiveness of the SMEs in each cluster.

The results of our cluster analysis indeed suggest the existence of four configurations of SMEs based on the managerial perceptions of the value creating potential of the different resources and capabilities at the firms' disposal. The authors find evidence that managerial perception of the strategic relevance of resources and capabilities at a firm's disposal could influence firm-level competitiveness. Managers of firms that perceive high value or importance to the resources and capabilities, considered the ten resource pillars for competitiveness in this study, are also likely to be the most competitive.

This study is exploratory in nature and intends to provide an initial and more descriptive analysis of SME competitiveness in an emerging economy context. Additionality, the study does not take into account the effect of industry membership.

The choice of an emerging economy that are often characterized by asymmetric information and informal rules and regulations provides an original context for an understudied area of research in firm-level competitiveness.