Search results

Relational engagement is offered as a framework to describe how buyers and sellers conduct exchange. Relational engagement is conceptualized as a higher-order construct comprising three dimensions: legal bonds, knowledge exchange and co-production. This paper aims to examine the efficacy of the construct by testing its influence on buyer–perceived seller brand equity.

An online survey of 401 US-based industrial buyers was conducted. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Empirical analysis supports the proposed conceptualization of relational engagement, as well as its influence on seller brand equity through influencing buyer-perceived relationship effectiveness.

Relational engagement offers a template to sellers for engaging organizational buyers. A relational engagement strategy has favorable implications for seller brand equity.

Relational engagement offers a comprehensive strategic perspective on inter-organizational exchange, moving beyond tactical approaches. The framework reflects the continuum of exchange, incorporating transactional-dominant and relationship-dominant forms of inter-organizational marketing practices.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise and validate a scale to capture entrepreneurship behaviour at the human resource management (HRM) functional level.

Drawing from the HRM and entrepreneurship literature, this paper first conceptualises and operationalises entrepreneurial behaviour at the human resource (HR) functional level. Second, it uses a multi-phase, systematic scale development procedure to design a two-dimensional scale of entrepreneurial HRM. Finally, the scale is validated by testing its relationship with HRM innovation.

The findings suggest that entrepreneurial behaviour at the HRM functional level is characterised by innovativeness, pro-activeness, risk-taking and consensus-building behaviour. The scale shed new light on the roles of HR professionals.

This paper highlights the need for HR professionals to demonstrate entrepreneurial behaviour in HRM value addition. The scale development process, while providing a detailed understanding of the entrepreneurial behaviour at the HR functional level, will facilitate future research.

This scale provides HR professionals with the means to measure and improve entrepreneurial HRM, leading to higher levels of HRM-based value addition.

This is the first known attempt to capture entrepreneurial behaviour at the HRM functional level.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a sustainability-based typology for non-profit organizations and corresponding strategies to sustain the mission and/or financial objectives of non-profit organizations. The balance of mission and money, known in the non-profit literature as the double bottom line, is a challenge for professional managers who run non-profits and scholars who study them.

Typologies are often used to classify phenomena to improve understanding and bring about clarity. In this paper, non-profit organizations are viewed from a social and fiscal viability perspective, developed from the long standing challenge of balancing mission and money.

The typology developed in this paper identifies several normative strategies that correspond to the social and fiscal viability of non-profit organizations. In fact, the strategies offered in this paper can help non-profit managers achieve organizational sustainability, thus enabling them to continue what they are meant to do – to provide greater social value to their constituents.

The typology presented is a classification system rather than a theoretical typology. Its purpose is to help managers of non-profits to recognize threats to their organizations’ long-term survival and offer strategies that if adopted can move the organizations to less vulnerable positions. However, the recommended strategies are by no means exhaustive. Furthermore, the focus of the paper is on non-profit organizations, not profit-driven or hybrid entities. The sustainability-based typology of non-profit organizations and the corresponding strategies have implications for practitioners and academics. The typology and its contents can help managers assess their non-profits, competitive environment and their current strategies, plan their double bottom line strategies and last but not the least, develop and implement strategies for social and fiscal sustainability. In addition, our paper provides great opportunities for future research to subject our typology and its contents to conceptual and empirical scrutiny.

The strategies described here are developed based on scholarly research and examples from successful non-profits. The typology and the related list of strategies provide a manager with the tools to accurately diagnose organizational challenges and adopt plans to improve the organization’s viability.

Non-profit organizations are an integral part of society that bolsters economic prosperity, environmental integrity and social justice. This paper may provide guidance for a number of non-profit managers to keep their organizations operating and serving important social missions.

In the context of organizations for social mission, several typologies exist that looked at firms from the perspectives of ownership versus profit objectives, entrepreneurship conceptualizations of economists and origins and development paths of social enterprises. While these typologies provided foundations for theoretical and empirical work into social enterprises, our typology offers strategies for the sustainability of mission and/or money objectives of non-profits. The value of this research lies in integrating virtuous and pragmatic objectives of non-profit sustainability that, in turn, can ensure the social mission of non-profits.

The current study aims to examine the role of international entrepreneurship and innovation in small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) internationalisation, also touching on the role of the firm size as a proxy of resources in the SME internationalisation process. The study seeks to look at these issues in the context of manufacturing firms, arguing that entrepreneurial SMEs pursuing international market entry undertake organisational innovation, which in turn enables such firms to achieve higher marketplace performance.

The paper was based on the development and administration of a self‐completed survey of 302 managers.

The results suggest that international SMEs differ from non‐international SMEs in terms of international entrepreneurship, organisational innovation intensity and firm size.

The cross‐sectional research design and the regional nature of the sampled firms may limit the generalisability of the findings. The manufacturing sectors that were studied provided an appropriate setting, although research in other industries is required.

The findings provide SME managers with a feasible path to internationalisation, in that firms striving towards internationalisation must undertake organisational innovation. Innovative firms are better equipped to exploit international market opportunities and perform better in such markets.

In spite of the central role assigned to innovation in a firm's competitive strategy, the literature that examines the role of innovation in SME internationalisation has been limited. Addressing this research gap the paper examines the role of international entrepreneurship and innovation in SME internationalisation.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the domain of entrepreneurial marketing (EM) responding to the challenge to EM scholars to more fully develop EM as a school of marketing thought. The paper seeks to argue that the context of the born global firm is an appropriate and novel context in which to undertake this research.

The need to examine the processes of EM justifies the use of case study method. In total, nine born global firms, located in the three most populous states in Australia: Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, were selected for study. The firms were drawn from hi‐tech and low‐tech industry sectors, and included online businesses, in an attempt to capture maximum theoretical variation.

The analysis identifies the four key strategies of entrepreneurial marketing as comprising opportunity creation, customer intimacy‐based innovative products, resource enhancement and importantly, legitimacy. These core strategies of EM are identified by mapping to enhanced performance.

Some may consider the born global context a limitation. Therefore, it is suggested that further empirical research could be undertaken on other cohorts of small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), such as service SMEs, to provide increased insight into the strategies and practices in the domain of EM. Quantitative research to operationalize the EM construct and model theoretical relationships is also suggested.

This paper advances the domain of EM into a new phase by empirically identifying four core strategies of EM. It finds that EM contributes to the achievement of superior performance in small firms through purposeful strategy based an effectuation approach.

For several decades, marketing researchers have stressed that firms can achieve competitive advantage by creating superior value for customers through innovation. However the literature on entrepreneurship and innovation based competitive strategy is deficient in several important respects. First, entrepreneurship has been poorly measured in the past. Next, research on innovation is biased towards technological innovation and new product development. Finally, robust measures of sustained competitive advantage have yet to emerge in the literature. This paper examines the role of entrepreneurship in organizational innovation‐based competitive strategy. The study finds that entrepreneurial firms pursue both technological and non‐technological innovations, and all such innovations lead to sustained competitive advantage. The study contributes to the emerging marketing and entrepreneurship interface paradigm by examining the role of entrepreneurship in the innovation based competitive strategy and refining and testing measures of entrepreneurship, organizational innovation, and sustained competitive advantage.

It has been argued that a firm's capacity to learn from its market is a source of both innovation and competitive advantage. However, past research has failed to conceptualize market‐focused learning activity as a capability having the potential to contribute to competitive advantage. Prior innovation research has been biased toward technological innovation. However, there is evidence to suggest that both technological and non‐technological innovations contribute to competitive advantage reflecting the need for a broader conceptualization of the innovation construct. Past research has also overlooked the critical role of entrepreneurship in the capability building process. Competitive advantage has been predominantly measured in terms of financial indicators of performance. In general, the literature reflects the need for comprehensive measures of organizational innovation and competitive advantage. This paper examines the role of market‐focused learning capability in organizational innovation‐based competitive strategy. The paper contributes to the strategic marketing theory by developing and refining measures of entrepreneurship, market‐focused learning capability, organizational innovation and sustained competitive advantage, testing relationships among these constructs.

International entrepreneurship (IE) is a new field of multi‐disciplinary enquiry that has its origins in the research on born globals. Within international marketing the concept has attracted the attention of researchers examining the factors driving small‐ and medium‐size firm internationalisation. These small, rapidly internationalising, entrepreneurial new ventures have recently both challenged and fascinated scholars and practitioners. While IE researchers are beginning to call for a broadening of the field of IE enquiry, this research continues the focus on the special breed of small firms, the born globals. We do this to deepen our understanding of IE, and focus on networking in born globals to attempt to develop richer insights directed towards establishing more in‐depth understanding and more robust theoretical frameworks.

Relationships and networking have been important in internationalisation studies for some time, and for small firms in particular are of interest for their role in helping overcome “resource poverty”. Case study method is adopted to examine the generative mechanisms and processes of networking capabilities. Drawing on six exemplar case studies from low‐tech and hi‐tech industry sectors, this research identifies the role and characteristics of the entrepreneurial owner/manager and the development of networking capability over time.

Fundamental and secondary networking capabilities are identified. How networking capability enables identification and exploitation of market opportunities, facilitates the development of knowledge‐intensive products and firm international market performance in the born global firm is discussed. The issue of network rigidity is also highlighted. A conceptual model is presented, implications discussed and future research directions, in particular the extension of networking capability research to large firms exhibiting IE, are promulgated.

Overall the findings of the study contribute to the development of IE research by identifying the centrality and scope of the impact of networking capabilities in small born global firms arguing that dynamic networking capability characterises IE in this context.

Purpose – This paper compares the experiential consumption values that motivate consumer choice to purchase online for both male and female purchasers and non‐purchasers. Design/methodology/approach – Using the theory of consumption value the study examines gendered perceptions of the functional, social and conditional value of using a virtual consumption setting for purchasing. Data was collected through an online survey and analysed using multiple discriminant analysis to determine meaningful differences between male and female purchasers and non‐purchasers. Findings – The findings show that male online purchasers are discriminated from female purchasers by social value and from male non‐purchasers by conditional value. Female purchasers are discriminated from male purchasers by functional value and from female non‐purchasers by social value. Female non‐purchasers are discriminated from female purchasers by conditional value. Male non‐purchasers are discriminated from male purchasers by functional and social value. Research limitations/implications – Limitations include using an Internet survey and an Australian sample which may impact the generalisability of the findings to a wider population of Internet users. Future research should involve replication of the study in a country more or less developed in terms of gender composition of internet users to extend the generalisability of the findings. Additionally, researchers should examine whether other dimensions of consumption value, such as social influence through on‐ and off‐line communication networks, may influence consumer choice to purchase online. Practical implications – The study provides practical implications for marketers to leverage consumption values that influence male and female consumers' choice to purchase online and then drive their behaviour online through integrated marketing campaigns that involve both on‐ and offline strategies. Originality/value – The research makes an original contribution to the consumer behaviour literature as to date, no research has been found that undertakes such a comprehensive gender‐based comparison of the perceived value of using a virtual consumption setting for purchasing.

Literature in the entrepreneurial marketing (EM) field continues to flourish with a noted increase in publications in recent years. This study aims to conduct a bibliographic analysis of EM literature, to examine the intellectual landscape of the field and assess scientific productivity and impact.

A total of 1,363 EM papers, extracted from the Web of Science database, were identified between 2005 and 2019. Co-authorship, citation, co-citation and keyword co-occurrence were examined, identifying the most-prominent authors, articles, journals and countries of publication, citation and co-citation. Network maps were created using VOSviewer.

The findings indicate that EM has become a thriving, multidisciplinary field that has reached a point of maturity, where exploration is seemingly a major focus of the field’s expansion. This maturity is mirrored in the evolution of the EM operationalisation – moving from a narrowly defined scope to a far broader and encompassing operationalisation. Distinct schools of thought emerging in the literature have been identified and emerging trends guiding the future growth of the EM field have been discussed. The expansion of the field continues to be assembled on the foundation of a number of seminal papers.

This research offers an updated examination of the EM field, in particular, including a period of recent expansion in the field. The incorporation of network maps offers a visual depiction of the intellectual landscape of the field.