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This paper aims to shed light on how small- and medium-sized enterprises can use export promotion programmes (EPPs) to improve their performance. The proposed conceptual model focuses on the need that the mechanism of awareness and use of EPPs should play a more active strategic role in shaping the firm’s export performance.

A meta-analysis of the pertinent literature reveals 16 studies on EPPs.

This study reveals that there are 16 relationships which are important based on the meta-analytic correlations. The analysis of these relationships shows that EPPs, export performance, strategy, knowledge, commitment, capabilities, competitive advantage and experience are the mostly used constructs.

This investigation supports the view that the moderating effects of the improvement of trust relationship between partners, i.e. importers to exporter and public policymakers to exporter, and the mechanism of awareness and use of EPPs accelerate the firm’s export performance. EPPs explain 31.3 per cent of the variance in export performance indicating their catalytic role in the exports’ growth.

This chapter delves into the impact of digital initiatives on firms and sheds light on how they can be explained through market reactions and the resource/capabilities mechanism. By providing a novel conceptual framework that reflects the potential impact of digital initiatives on the sensing, seizing and transforming capabilities of dynamic capabilities, this chapter reveals the tremendous potential of digital initiatives to help firms become more adaptive to their environment and create sustainable competitive advantages that elicit positive market responses. This conceptual framework represents an original contribution to the literature. It enhances the understanding of the resource-based view and efficient market hypothesis, providing a fresh perspective on the influence of digital initiatives on firm performance and the dynamic capabilities mechanism that has hitherto been overlooked. As a result, this chapter enables researchers to develop testable hypotheses that examine the causal relationships between digital initiatives, dynamic capabilities and market performance using robust quantitative research methods. Furthermore, this chapter offers valuable insights for managers seeking to develop a more focused approach to digital transformation and enhance their competitive advantage. By exploring the impact of digital initiatives on sensing, seizing and transforming capabilities, managers can gain a deeper understanding of how they can leverage digital initiatives to improve their organisational performance and respond more effectively to the demands of an ever-changing landscape.

A central claim of stakeholder theory is that the purpose of business is to create value for various stakeholders. However, managing diverse interests of stakeholders can be challenging in a business environment entrenched with different value systems. Lacking of qualitative narratives and complicated nature of corporate governance perhaps have impeded the stakeholder theory to become a major theory of strategic management and organizational ethics on its own. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the strategic values of stakeholder management.

Three stakeholder management case studies, taken in the context of a large corporatized public organization, were conducted in attempting to amplify the underpinning theories of stakeholder identified by Laplume et al. (2008). Tape-recorded semi-structured interviews were transcribed into texts. To reduce retrospective bias, some typical secondary records were examined.

Stakeholder management can be a core competence that draws resource capabilities throughout a firm for generating desirable triple bottom line results, which also eases the tensions between shareholders and stakeholders of the firm.

Stakeholder management is an organizational mechanism tightly embedded in the firms’ strategic organizing and strategizing routines. It is vital for generating desirable triple bottom line results. This conjures up potential linkages between the stakeholder theory and the resource-based view (RBV) theory as pursuing stakeholder management can be a hard-to-emulate strategic asset within the framework of the RBV theory.

There is relatively scant literature that pays attention on amplifying stakeholder management theory in the public sector organizations. Through the unlocking of some valuable public sector data sets, this research can make a positive contribution in the areas.

This paper aims to examine the role strategic problem identification and resolution played in identifying and capturing new sources of competitive advantage as CSL Limited (CSL) transformed itself into the world’s fifth-largest biotechnology company. Historical accounts of superior business growth are usually explained by looking back to identify a firm’s sources of competitive advantage. However, what managers really want to know is how to identify opportunities to create and capture competitive advantage ahead of competitors.

The authors examined CSL’s journey between 1994 and 2019 through a case study approach and the lens of the problem-identification and problem-solving perspective (PSP). The PSP assumes strategic problems act as antecedents to discovering and capturing new sources of competitive advantage. The problems a firm identifies and resolves influences whether or not, in what direction and for whom an organization creates value.

The authors provide examples of the strategic problems CSL identified and how they acted as the catalyst to proactively identify new sources of competitive advantage. The formulated problems helped manager to see in advance what resources, capabilities and governance mechanisms would be required to create and capture value.

Generalizing the lessons learned, the authors propose a business-problem classification framework and portfolio approach to encourage managers to identify, formulate and resolve different types of strategic problems. These problems could motivate firms to tackle problems beyond which they have successfully tackled before and discover new sources of competitive advantage ahead of competitors.

The aim of both marketing theorists and resource-based view proponents is to explain the creation and the sustainability of competitive advantages (Srivastava et al., 2001, p. 777). What has not been considered so far is the role of exploitation positions within the competitive game. The purpose of this article is to investigate the consequences of a strategy concerning the active creation of exploitation positions on the side of the customers. The reason for this is the observed tendency in several industries – elevators, paper machines, gas turbines – to actively create such positions. The underlying assumption is that this strategy leads to a competitive advantage for the initial transaction as well as to higher profits for the supplier taking into account the entire relationship. Mainly the second advantage of a higher profit depends heavily on the sustainability of an exploitation position. Therefore, this paper identifies the drivers controlling the sustainability of an exploitation position. In order to derive a broad understanding three different theoretical approaches – Transaction Cost Economics, the Resource-Based View, and Market Process Theory (Austrian Economics) – will be used to explain the effects of exploitation on the competitive position and the profit of the supplier. Finally, the outcome of this paper is threefold: First, the competitive consequences of an exploitation strategy will be identified. Second, the impact of each theoretical approach on the question of exploitation will be analyzed. Third, the integrative potential of the three different theoretical approaches will be examined. More precisely, we discuss institutional economics and information asymmetry in a truly dynamic setting and the impact of radical ignorance and alertness on the idea of isolating mechanisms. This will be done in a parallel discussion of the problems in general and along one case study which focuses on the elevator market.

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.

Extant literature suggests that post-entry internationalization strategies and performance implications of born globals are an under-researched area. This paper aims to examine the internationalization strategies of born global service firms (BGSFs) and performance implications thereof through strategic group analysis of hand-collected data from Indian information technology (IT) firms.

Strategic group analysis has been used to examine if there are any differences in the strategic decisions across firms and if there are any implications of these strategies on the performance of firms. The strategic group approach helps understand not only the antecedents but also the strategic trade-offs that different groups of BGSFs face after internationalization. The study uses Indian IT industry as the context for analysis of BGSFs, as studies have found that the Indian IT industry to have significant presence of born globals.

Four distinct strategic paths were found to be followed by BGSFs. In addition, the nature of services and ways of mobilization or deployment of resources explain the different internationalization paths and consequently performance. The performance differences primarily stem from the choice of degree of commitment and scope of internationalization.

This study provides distinct insights to practice by charting internationalization paths for an emerging born global.

This paper contributes to the theory on born globals by using strategic lens to explain the internationalization paths and their performance implications.

To gain competitive advantage, shipping companies need the abilities to manage environmental requirements, which this study refers to as sustainable shipping capabilities, including internal resources and external factors such as inter-firm collaboration. However, previous studies mainly focused on the effectiveness of internal resources, leading decision-makers in shipping companies to undervalue the significance of external relationships in managing sustainability issues and their impact on performance. Therefore, this paper aims to identify and examine the impacts of sustainable inter-firm collaboration on shipping companies' business performance (i.e. shippers' loyalty and financial performance).

A proposed model that explains the relationships between relation bonding strategies, sustainable inter-firm collaboration and business performance was developed. Accordingly, a survey questionnaire was constructed and sent to 294 shipping companies in Vietnam. Structural equation modeling was deployed to examine the validity of the measurement items and investigate relationships among the latent constructs.

The findings show that financial bonding strategies have the most significant impact on sustainable inter-firm collaboration, followed by social bonding strategies and structural bonding strategies. Furthermore, sustainable inter-firm collaboration has direct and indirect (via perceived shippers' loyalty) effects on business performance.

Relational bonding strategies provide a unique perspective to sustainable inter-firm collaboration. This study also contributes to allocate external resources and capabilities to improve inter-firm collaboration, thereby maximizing financial performance.

This paper contributes to the literature by applying relational bonding strategies that determine the key factors enabling sustainable inter-firm collaboration.