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The purpose of this paper is to review existing literature at the intersection of resilience and entrepreneurship. It identifies six scholarly conversations, each of which draws on distinct notions of resilience and entrepreneurship. Based on those conversations, shortcomings in the existing literature are discussed and avenues for future research are outlined.

A systematic multi-disciplinary review of 144 papers that are categorized into six scholarly conversations to build the foundation for a critical discussion of each line of inquiry.

This paper identifies six conversations or research streams at the intersection of entrepreneurship and resilience: resilience as traits or characteristics of entrepreneurial firms or individuals, resilience as a trigger for entrepreneurial intentions, entrepreneurial behavior as enhancing organizational resilience, entrepreneurial firms fostering macro-level (regions, communities, economies) resilience, resilience in the context of entrepreneurial failure, and resilience as a process of recovery and transformation. The review revealed these publications imprecisely define constructs and use a limited amount of the extant scholarship on both entrepreneurship and resilience. Future research should take a more holistic approach to explore entrepreneurship and resilience from a multi-level and longitudinal perspective, especially in the context of socio-ecological sustainability.

This paper incorporates insights on resilience and entrepreneurship across academic disciplines to show how future contributions could benefit by incorporating research from other fields. In doing so, it provides a starting point for more nuanced discussions around the interrelationships between the different conversations and the role entrepreneurs can play in promoting a positive, long-term trajectory for a socio-ecological system.

Research has reliably demonstrated that decision-makers, especially expert ones, use heuristics to make decisions under uncertainty. However, whether decision-makers with little or no experience also do, and if so, how? is unknown. This research addresses this issue in the marketing context by studying how a group of young and generally inexperienced entrepreneurs decide when asked to set a price and choose a distribution channel in a scenario involving a hypothetical firm.

The authors used think-aloud protocols to elicit data and then used inductive procedures to code the data for analysis.

The inexperienced entrepreneurs in the sample used three types of heuristics in their decision-making, forming a structured process that narrows in scope. First, metacognitive heuristics, which specify a decision-making approach, were used, followed by heuristics representing the criteria they considered, and finally, heuristics detailing the execution of a selected option. The authors also found that heuristics relating to a market orientation, especially customer-centric criteria, were the most common, but these were balanced with ones representing an internal orientation or growth.

The generally inexperienced decision-makers the authors’ studied used heuristics in a structured way that helped them to select and balance several potentially conflicting decision-making criteria. As with most research using qualitative research designs, the generalizability of these findings is unclear. Further research on the mechanisms by which relatively inexperienced decision-makers learn the heuristics they use is recommended.

This research's novelty lies in its focus on heuristic use by nonexpert decision-makers under conditions of uncertainty and the findings about their scope and the order they are used. As the authors collected data from think-aloud protocols with relatively young entrepreneurs with limited experience, they also offer a description of the heuristics used by nascent entrepreneurs when making marketing decisions about pricing and channels. The most surprising conclusion is that even without relevant domain-specific knowledge, decision-makers can use heuristics in an ecologically rational way (i.e. structured to match the environment).

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on links between entrepreneurship and resilience.

The authors discuss some key themes in this emerging area of research and reflect on how the papers in the issue contribute to debates in the literature on resilience.

While the papers in the special issue make important contributions, there is still scope for more research.

This is one of the first issues of a journal devoted to investigating this topic.

A transaction cost analysis model of the situations in which small knowledge‐intensive firms use multiple distribution channels to serve a foreign market is developed. The central argument is that integrated modes are generally preferred, as they facilitate protection of knowledge‐based assets and the provision of high levels of customer service and support. However, it is hypothesised that either plural or hybrid selling may be used, if assets can be protected in other ways, as a response to environmental diversity, when sales volumes are sufficient to support multiple channels, and in relatively mature markets, where sales growth has started to plateau. Data gathered from Canadian software developers generally support these propositions. The results help the managers of knowledge‐intensive firms to identify some of the circumstances in which multiple export channels might be deployed to enhance sales performance in a foreign market.

The choice of export mode is a key decision for firms entering foreign markets. The channel management and internationalisation literatures provide rationales for the selection of channel modes but offer little insight into the nature of the decision‐making process itself. There is a paucity of research that answers questions such as how long does it take to make a decision, is a formal plan prepared, and is advice solicited from external sources? This paper reports the results of a disk‐by‐mail survey that collected information on the export mode decisions of Canadian software firms. Managers of the responding firms most frequently reported that they made their decision quickly and by intuition, without the benefit of formal studies or consultation with outside experts. Further, the characteristics of the decision process have no statistically significant association with channel performance. The implications of these results for the theory and practice of export marketing are discussed.

A fundamental proposition in marketing strategy is that a market orientation is positively related to firm performance. However, the mechanisms of this relationship have yet to be explored in detail, especially in service industries where intangible assets are relatively more important. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a model that identifies important intermediate variables between a market orientation and increased firm value. The model posits that a market orientation guides investment in market‐based assets and other asset types, that these assets may be levered to create a competitive advantage and value for customers, and that this results in loyalty and easier customer attraction. Quicker and more extensive market penetration, shorter sales cycles, and decreased marketing and sales costs enhance the cash flow of a market‐oriented firm. This may be recognised in higher valuations, which ultimately translate into higher share prices and wealth creation for the owners of the firm.

Collaboration as a means to enabling and nourishing innovation is an important theme in the extant literature, which posits that face-to-face interactions lubricate the knowledge flow between actors, and that clusters of complementary knowledge assets provide the necessary infrastructure for this process. What happens to firms that are located outside of urban agglomerations or in peripheral regions? Are they less innovative, or can information and communication technologies (ICT) serve as a proxy for face-to-face collaboration? Theory is polarized in terms of the role that ICT may play in collaborative transactions. For example, network theory explains that weak ties are important in terms of refreshing a firm's innovation capacity by forcing it to include ideas from the periphery. Others argue that ICT cannot supplant face-to-face interaction since it is not an efficient medium for transferring tacit knowledge. This chapter uses data from the Statistics Canada 2003 Survey of Innovation to investigate empirically the relationship between firm location, innovativeness, and the extent of local and more distant collaboration.

Extant studies of the market orientation of service firms rarely consider the contribution of individual employees to the realization of this orientation. Existing scales that measure market orientation reveal the perceptions of a key informant about the dominant orientation within the firm. These scales do not measure the willingness of employees to act in a market‐oriented way. This paper aims to report the development of a multi‐dimensional scale of individual market‐oriented behavior.

The scale development process included identification of items from focus groups with employees of a major Canadian financial services firm and the market orientation literature. A pretest with marketing practitioners and academics helped to purify and reduce the number of items. Finally, a sample of North American financial services employees responded to the items in a web‐based questionnaire.

Confirmatory factor analysis of the responses confirmed the presence of a single latent construct with three dimensions: information acquisition, information sharing and strategic response, measured by 20 items.

Although scale validation included both qualitative and quantitative tests that triangulated the opinions of multiple stakeholders in the service delivery chain, future research must also test the predictive validity of this scale.

Such research is important to increase understanding of how service organizations foster market orientation. The I‐MARKOR augments the organizational scorecard approach with individual level measurement.

The scale provides a method to assess differences between individuals within an organization, enabling empirical research on differences between departments, roles, training and other characteristics that may influence the extent to which an individual performs market‐oriented behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of two distinct geographic pathways to internationalization for small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). Regional and global pathways are juxtaposed to study the influence on export performance of selected key intangible resources, namely, innovation, human resource management, networking and the firm's experience.

Building upon a resource‐based view of the firm, Tobit regression models are used to test the hypotheses on a sample of 2,657 Italian manufacturing firms.

The paper provides empirical evidence that the determinants of SME export performance vary in line with the geographic scope of internationalization. While product innovation (innovation) positively impacts on SME export performance, irrespective of export destination, other factors do so selectively. For example, location in industrial districts (networking) and the deployment of external managers (human resource management) exclusively exert their positive impact respectively on regional and global export performance. The firm's age (experience) does not seem to guarantee success on regional or global export markets.

Investing in product innovation and hiring specialist non‐family executives are associated with success on global export markets. Industry clustering provides the resources that are useful for internationalization up to a point (export growth in regional markets), but it is not effective in the case of expansion on distant international markets.

Exporting beyond the regional market exposes firms to the liability of foreignness to a greater degree, thus requiring more dedicated and specialized resources and competences. This paper supports the hypothesis that export drivers differ between regional and global markets and calls for a definition of export performance that distinguishes between them.