This paper analyzes the effects of market orientation and innovation on competitive advantage and business performance. The method of collecting data is a designed questionnaire. The sample size is ...150 textile SMEs in Selangor, Malaysia. Path analysis by operating SPSS 20.0 is used in analyzing the research. The result shows that market orientation and innovation had positive and significant effects on competitive advantage, partially. Market orientation and innovation give contributions to the competitive advantage of 46.3% while the rest of 54.7% are influenced by other variables which are not described in this study. Competitive advantage partially has a positive and significant influence on business performance. Market orientation and innovation also have significant effects on business performance both directly and indirectly through competitive advantage. Market orientation, innovation, and competitive advantage give contributions to the business performance of 58.4% while the rest of 41.6% are influenced by others variables which are not described in this study.
•Public universities are facing increasing global competitiveness.•Legitimacy and reputation are fundamental intangible assets to ensure sustainable competitive advantage.•HEI’ legitimacy depends on ...their capability to respond to stakeholders’ expectations.•Reputation positively affects the legitimacy of public.
Globalization, rankings, and the decrease of public funding have created a highly competitive environment for public universities. Internal and external stakeholders increasingly demand better results in term of research, teaching, knowledge transfer, employability, and community outreach. In this new landscape, intangible assets such as reputation and legitimacy are key factors for gaining a sustained competitive advantage. And yet, here remains a lack of clarity about these variables and their relationships. This research aims to increase our understanding of the field by measuring how reputation, by way of its influence on legitimacy, can create a sustained competitive advantage for public universities. We measure reputation and legitimacy by surveying 509 professors from 47 different Spanish universities, considering pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy types and analyze reputation in terms of performance, innovation, citizenship, services, governance, and workplace climate. According to faculty members, a university’s reputation has a significative and positive effect on its legitimacy.
McGrath introduced a new strategic perspective based on the concept of transient competitive advantage by taking into consideration that changes are intrinsic features of nowadays economy. Her ...concept differs from traditional strategic ones, which are based on market’s stability and inertia. Accordingly, the aim of the present study is to analyze the business scenario in the transience scope based on the Transient Competitive Advantage Model (TCAM). In order to do so, a case study was applied to three technology companies graded by business incubators in Brazil. The study was carried out through semi-structured interviews, which were qualitatively analyzed based on TCAM. Results have shown a “consistent, but unsystematic and reactive environment” in the three assessed companies. Moreover, the goal was to help outspreading the concept of transient advantages and to validate TCAM.
The comparative advantage among countries determines their trade relations pattern and even regional governance mode, which has profound significance for understanding the Belt and Road (B&R) ...initiative. B&R has been gaining attention internationally since its proposal. This paper aims to investigate the structure and influence factors of trade competitive advantage networks of the countries along the B&R (BR-TCANs). Different from the existing literature, this paper constructs the directed trade comparative advantage index (DTCA), and establishes BR-TCANs by using the bilateral trade data in 1993–2018 collected from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (UNCOMTRADE). Subsequently, based on complex network approach, we analyze the structure and its evolution characteristics of BR-TCANs, and then discuss the factors that influence the formation of BR-TCANs’ structure by using exponential random graph models (ERGMs). The results show that there are obvious small-world and reciprocity characteristics on BR-TCANs. Both Turkey and Russia have the largest scope of trade competitive advantages, and China has the strongest intermediation ability in BR-TCANs. BR-TCANs form three communities, including the West, the North and the South. The formation of BR-TCANs is greatly influenced by popularity, clustering, reciprocity and self-reinforcing mechanism, and is manifested in the heterogeneity of GDP and FDI and in the homogeneity of population and trade openness. Countries with higher GDP, spoken language and currency advantages are more likely to establish trade competitive advantages with others. Accordingly, the BR-TCANs are embedded in the networks of common language, currency, geographic boundary and free trade agreements.
This study investigates the influence of investment in key intangible resources and capabilities of firms, including intellectual capital (IC), financial capability (FC), and corporate social ...responsibility (CSR) on sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) and firm performance (FP) in an emerging country, Pakistan. The research model and its pertinent hypotheses are tested on a sample of 329 Pakistani small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by a structural equation model (SEM). The results exhibited a significant influence of the aforesaid factors on FP. However, SCA fully mediates the relationship between FC and FP and between CSR and FP, whereas SCA partially mediates the relationship between IC and FP. Taken together, the findings suggest the role of CSR and FC in indirectly spurring FP through SCA. Despite the limitations of this study, the results have several practical and theoretical implications for owners, managers, and policymakers.
Para desfrutar de vantagem competitiva duradoura, tornou-se essencial que as organizações não apenas se adaptem aos ambientes em constante mutação, mas que também desenvolvam a capacidade de inovar. ...A rede de negócios empreendedores, está à disposição das empresas para ajudar na conquista de objetivos em comum. As pequenas empresas possuem estrutura reduzida que facilita o fluxo de informações e proximidade com clientes e fornecedores, é neste sentido que as capacidades dinâmicas podem ser um diferencial frente a alta competitividade existente entre estas empresas. Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo avaliar em que medida as capacidades dinâmicas moderam a relação entre a rede de negócios empreendedores e o desempenho corporativo de pequenas empresas, é caracterizada como descritiva quanto aos objetivos, como levantamento quanto aos procedimentos e como quantitativa quanto à abordagem do problema. A amostra compreende gestores de 110 pequenas empresas do município de Pato Branco (PR). Os resultados demonstraram que a utilização das capacidades dinâmicas pelos gestores, possibilita o desempenho corporativo das pequenas empresas, e que a interação empreendedora possibilita melhor desenvolvimento e maiores lucros. Por meio desta interação é possível identificar as necessidades dos participantes da rede de negócios, tornando-se um diferencial competitivo e de inovação. A rede de negócios é vista pelos gestores como forma de proteção, e isso tem fortalecido o mercado e motivado o desenvolvimento de novos produtos e serviços, além de ter um papel fundamental na sobrevivência e desenvolvimento das pequenas empresas.
Does digitalization make competitive advantage more or less sustainable? One line of argument is that digitalization leads to hyper-competition and shorter spells of competitive advantage. An ...opposing claim is that digitalization leads to advantages of a size and sustainability unprecedented in the “old” economy. We argue that the likelihood of observing either of these outcomes depend on the extent to which the dominant business model(s) in a market combine the accumulation and use of Big Data with the generation and utilization of network effects. The more complementary Big Data and network effects are in a business model, the more likely that we will observe large and sustainable competitive advantages, and vice-versa. Furthermore, we argue that firms enjoying a data-driven network-advantage have strong incentives and ability to envelop to adjacent markets. In the longer run, such envelopment will cause an increasing number of markets to be characterized by more sustainable competitive advantages.
“Organizational agility” is often treated as an immutable quality, implying that firms need to be in a constant state of transformation. However, this ignores that such transformations, while often ...essential, come at a cost. They are not always necessary, and may not even be possible. This article explores agility at a more fundamental level and relates it more specifically to dynamic capabilities. It demonstrates that it is first essential to understand deep uncertainty, which is ubiquitous in the innovation economy. Uncertainty is very different from risk, which can be managed using traditional tools and approaches. Strong dynamic capabilities are necessary for fostering the organizational agility necessary to address deep uncertainty, such as that generated by innovation and the associated dynamic competition. This article explores the mechanisms by which managers may calibrate the required level of organizational agility, deliver it cost effectively, and relate it to strategy.
Classical economic theories prescribe specialization of countries industrial production. Inspection of the country databases of exported products shows that this is not the case: successful countries ...are extremely diversified, in analogy with biosystems evolving in a competitive dynamical environment. The challenge is assessing quantitatively the non-monetary competitive advantage of diversification which represents the hidden potential for development and growth. Here we develop a new statistical approach based on coupled non-linear maps, whose fixed point defines a new metrics for the country Fitness and product Complexity. We show that a non-linear iteration is necessary to bound the complexity of products by the fitness of the less competitive countries exporting them. We show that, given the paradigm of economic complexity, the correct and simplest approach to measure the competitiveness of countries is the one presented in this work. Furthermore our metrics appears to be economically well-grounded.
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