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In addition to their internal resources, companies in most industries rely upon external strategic resources to maintain and improve their performance. External strategic resources have a similar effect on competitiveness but are located in the company’s networks or even in unrelated industries. Some companies underuse these resources, while other companies focus too strongly on accessing external resources in their own industry, which results in hyper-competition. This paper aims to explain how different industries use external resources and describes the criteria for a balanced approach which leads to knowledge transfer, diversity and supports the development of new business.

Examples and evidence from four different industries are used to identify the different approaches for accessing external strategic resources.

Valuable external strategic resources are non-transferable, located in a complementary product organisation, knowledge-oriented, located in a different country, preferably not part of the organisation’s primary external focus (e.g. supply chain), able to introduce diversity and innovation and are compatible with network behaviours.

External strategic resources are frequently found within the organisation’s supply chain, however, use of these resources should be balanced by external resources from non-related industries to increase diversity and reduce the likelihood of hyper-competition.

This paper explains why external strategic resources are valuable, identifies the different approaches to accessing them, describes the benefits and drawbacks associated with each approach and provides the key criteria for identifying a valuable external strategic resource.

Business research and entrepreneurship literature typically examines external resources as input or output of entrepreneurial (or high) growth. The purpose of this paper is to combine these two perspectives in describing and modeling high growth.

The study tests the hypotheses on a sample of medium-sized, established manufacturing firms using structural equation modeling.

Results provide original contributions to the business research on firm growth and entrepreneurship. They are consistent with studies advocating the importance of adopting a process perspective when studying business growth to probe the causal mechanisms behind growth.

Being quantitative, this study does not address the dynamic interdependencies between proprietary and hybrid growth. However, the literature on entrepreneurship would benefit from qualitative studies that explore how successful and sustainable growth processes combine the two modes of growth.

Findings partially discard the input and output approach in favor of a vision of entrepreneurial growth as a process that unfolds over time with the development of external relationships. Only the process of collaboration, a core competence of entrepreneurial firms, reduces information asymmetries and agency problems, thus turning the corresponding inter-organizational relationships into formidable feeders of firm growth. Entrepreneurial growth is in fact a process that needs external relationships in order to flourish over time.

This paper aims to investigate the antecedents of supply chain information integration (SCII) and their consequences on company performance from the perspective of resource-based view (RBV).

Based on empirical survey data collected from 202 Australian manufacturers, this study examines the effects of strategic supply chain relationship (SCR) and supply chain technology (SCT) internalization on external and internal information integration (II) and the effects of external and internal II on operational (operational efficiency and service quality) and financial performance. Structural equation modeling and the maximum-likelihood estimation methods are used to test the proposed relationships.

The results indicate that both strategic SCR and SCT internalization are positively related to external and internal II. Moreover, strategic SCR has a stronger positive relationship with external II than with internal II, and SCT internalization has a stronger positive relationship with internal II than with external II. Internal II is positively related only to service quality, and external II is positively related only to operational efficiency. Both operational efficiency and service quality are positively related to financial performance.

This study contributes to the SCII literature and provides significant managerial implications for manufacturers to leverage their supply chain resources and capabilities by establishing a resources-capabilities-performance framework for the antecedents and consequences of SCII.

Firms operate in a market for their corporate assets, wherein important assets being bought and sold are business units. This market is therefore a primary mechanism for firm reconfiguration, and offers the opportunity for firms to gain performance advantage as they prepare for and engage in their boundary-changing moves. This paper focuses on resource reconfiguration between firms, and examines internally and externally driven sources of performance heterogeneity in firms’ use of the market for firm reconfiguration. Viewing between-firm resource reconfiguration through three theoretical lenses surfaces several potential avenues for firm differentiation. For one, the necessity of firms’ possessing capabilities to execute both sides of the external resource reconfiguration transaction – acquisition and divestiture capabilities – is revealed. For another, the institutional prerequisites that are needed in the operating environment for a firm to build a sustainable resource reconfiguration strategy are brought to the fore, and are well illustrated by the private equity industry. Lastly, the potential benefits of using the transactional view of firm scope to animate the study of external resource reconfiguration are raised. Taken together, these elements lead to a research agenda around resource reconfiguration across firm boundaries.

Chinese firms were operating within a closed economic environment before the “opening up” in the late 1970s, but it has only been in the late 1990s that China has recognized the importance of innovation. The Chinese government has attempted to rectify this liability by providing funding to assist Chinese firms in developing innovation capability by increasing R&D collaborations and employing external experts. The purpose of this paper is to study the innovation of Chinese firms by examining how internal and external resources interactively impact the innovation capability.

Panel data collected from Chinese manufacturers are used to test the hypothesized relationships.

The results have shown that the interplay between internal and external resources exhibits differential patterns of impact on innovation capability. The authors discover different moderating patterns of the two types of external resources: visiting experts are helpful in enhancing the effects of internal human resources, while R&D collaborations are useful in exploiting internal financial and physical resources, even when the main effect of financial resources on innovation capability is not significant.

The study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidences on the roles of absorbed external resources and knowledge to catalyze internal resources in building up innovation capability in an emerging economy.

This paper aims to explore the social entrepreneurs’ attention allocation and their resource action that lead to hybrid organization using the paradox theory. Paradox theory deepens understandings of the varied nature, dynamics and outcomes of entrepreneurial tensions. This study explores the systematic effects of internal and external attention on both economic and social performance.

First, theoretically, hypotheses linking different attention allocations to ambidextrous behavior and entrepreneurial performance were formulated. Subsequently, the empirical studies based on Chinese social entrepreneurship were conducted to test the hypotheses.

The study provides support to the hypotheses showing that external attention is linked to resource acquisition and social performance, while internal attention is linked to resource acquisition and strategic human resource management and thus these ambidextrous behaviors promote both social and economic performance. Furthermore, normal pressure moderates the relations between internal attention and strategic human resource management only.

The research measures entrepreneurs’ attention with questionnaire rather than psych test. Also, static data rather than longitudinal research is designed to test the hypotheses.

Deeper understanding of the attention of social entrepreneurs and resource action can help entrepreneurial outcomes and can potentially contribute to paradox and tension management by entrepreneurial practitioners in China.

Social entrepreneurs’ different attention allocation and related entrepreneurial ambidextrous behavior processes are linked to paradoxical thinking for the first time. The findings of this research can potentially enhance social entrepreneurship paradoxical thinking aimed at preventing mission drift.

Our study proposes a resource environment view (REV) of competitive advantage by unpacking the environmental origins of a firm’s competitive advantage. The key tenet of the REV is that the heterogeneity and imperfect mobility of strategic factor markets and institutions across countries explain how firms based in different countries would likely both create and sustain a competitive advantage. In particular, our study introduces the notion of “the paradox of environmental embeddedness.” The paradox lies in the fact that the same environmental conditions – in terms of strategic factor markets and institutions – that enable firms to create a competitive advantage can paradoxically also create a situation in which it is more difficult for these firms to sustain an advantage. Another important aspect of our study is that, to enhance our understanding of how firms manage the paradox of environmental embeddedness, our study specifies the resource environmental conditions under which firms’ internal and external resource-oriented strategies – that is, the development of dynamic capabilities and interventions in the country resource environment – are more beneficial when managing the environmental paradox. Overall, our theorizing has important implications for strategic management theory and practice.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of technological resources and external research partners on the export performance of Italian high-tech small and medium firms (SMEs).

Methodology/approach – Drawing on the resource-based view as theoretical framework and deriving hypotheses from the export management literature, we used a sample of Italian manufacturing firms to run a two-step analysis. First, a Levene's test is conducted to assess whether SMEs operating in the high-tech sectors differ from those operating in other manufacturing sectors. Second, employing ordinary least squares (OLS) regression we analysed which technological resources and external research partners best discriminate the export performance of high-tech SMEs.

Findings – Our empirical results revealed that: (1) the use of output rather than input measures of innovation better captures the contribution of technological resources on export performance of firms in our sample; (2) product innovations positively and significantly affect the export performance of technology intensive SMEs; (3) among external research partners, universities provide positive spillover effects on their export performance.

Originality/value – This study provides the heterogenic perspective of the high-tech sectors when attempting to explain the influence of technological resources and external research partners on the export performance of SMEs. Second, the study expands the traditional measures used in the literature for firms’ technological resources and it comprehensively analyses innovative inputs and innovative outputs while exploring whether innovative efforts have had a measurable effect on the export performance of high-tech SMEs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate researchers' operationalization of the construct of embedment of overseas R&D subsidiaries.

First, the paper provides a systematic literature review of subsidiary embedment research. Second, it draws on resource dependence theory (RDT) and argues how embedment of overseas R&D subsidiaries should be treated as a more multi‐faceted and complex phenomenon than has been apparent in the literature to date.

The authors find a large variation in the operationalization of embedment (e.g. frequency of communication versus depth of integration versus direction of communication). They also find scant attention to the nature of differences between external actors (types of actors, including local and international). These represent weaknesses that inhibit the advancement of theory and policy within the context of the globalization of innovation.

Researchers should treat R&D subsidiary embedment as a multi‐level phenomenon consisting of resource‐dependence interactions between collective entities internal and external to the subsidiary. R&D subsidiary embedment research design can be improved by being: formative; multiple‐actor; bi‐directional; and longitudinal.

Managers should treat external R&D subsidiary embedment as pattern of resource dependencies in which the actors that matter most to R&D subsidiary performance are a function of the importance and availability of the innovation‐specific resources they contain. This involves building a capability in multi‐level networking with R&D resource providers in the external environment.

The contribution of the current paper is to provide a critical evaluation of scholarly treatment of the construct of R&D subsidiary embedment, and to develop a foundation for operationalizing and analyzing the external embedment of R&D subsidiaries.

This paper aims to address a central question in strategy: how do internal resources firms mediate the effect of the external resources on the firms' performance?

The research was conducted in a sample of 173 Spanish innovative firms located in the Valencia region. Following the literature, the growth of the firm has been used as the main performance indicator. The paper considers the application in this context of the particular and new analysis techniques to combine mediator and moderator effects.

The research shows firms with higher internal resources exploit better external resources. The results confirm that knowledge intensive business services providers, as a form of external resources, exercise a positive influence on innovative firms' performance through the mediating effect of firms' internal assets.

First, the study uses only two well‐known internal resources and capabilities indicators. Second, the paper applies a strict and simple measure to the growth of innovative firms. Third, another limitation of this research relates to the sample and population of companies.

The study shows that the partial mediating effect exercised by internal resources and capabilities on growth, becomes more intense when new firms benefit from cluster location.

This study represents a new step toward closing the analytical gap in the existing literature on the potential interactions between external resources and new firm's internal attributes, and their combined effects on performance.