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We aim to explore the role of the interplay between intuition and rationality in the causation-effectuation decision-making processes of small creative businesses during their international expansion.

We developed process research to investigate the causation-effectuation decision-making processes during the internationalization of a creativity-intensive small business located in Brazil. In just three years, its cartoon reached screens in 80 countries.

We discovered an orthogonal relationship between causation and effectuation moderated by the balance between intuition and rationality, enabling small creative businesses to successfully navigate internationalization by adapting to contractual demands and exploring creative opportunities. To explain these relationships, we offer five process-based propositions for further studies.

We reconstructed the internationalization process based on retrospective interviews, so eliminating all biases from rationalization may have been impossible. We elucidate the interrelationship between causation-effectuation decision-making logic and demystify that decision-making effectuation logic is predominantly intuitive. We provide evidence that rational thinking permeates the entire decision-making process as a process of building the future.

Understanding causation-effectuation decision-making processes in creativity-intensive small businesses can be helpful for other businesses because they nurture production on a large scale.

The study emphasizes the importance of creativity-intensive small businesses to countries’ economies. Creativity-intensive businesses grow in other industries and generate many jobs in mature industries.

We demystify the decision-making assumption that effectuation logic is predominantly intuitive while causation logic is rational. Instead, we show that these logics coexist and interact orthogonally and dynamically.

When entrepreneurship scholars and policy makers turned their attention to entrepreneurial ventures during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2023), its full effects on entrepreneurial firms and systems presented radically challenging questions and unresolved puzzles. In this paper, the authors shed light on these questions and puzzles with a large-scale empirical examination of the pandemic's overall effects on entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial firms, entrepreneurial environments and responses with a view toward success and failure over time.

The authors adopt a broad exploratory approach and examine different perspectives to develop a deeper understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial firms, entrepreneurial environments and responses especially regarding the success and failure of entrepreneurial ventures during the pandemic. Thus, the authors built a dataset with 10 survey waves from 2020 to 2021, with an average of 7,000 Brazilian entrepreneurial ventures (SMEs) in each wave of the survey. The authors used this data to examine their performance and survival.

The findings suggest that the increase of the COVID-19 virus contagion per se did not severely affect entrepreneurial ventures' performance and survival. However, the worsening of the COVID-19 pandemic did weaken entrepreneurial ventures' performance and survival. Moreover, the findings suggest that entrepreneur education has an inverted U-shaped relationship with entrepreneurial ventures performance. Indigenous, Brown and Black entrepreneurs experienced decreased entrepreneurial ventures survival compared to White entrepreneurs. While entrepreneurial ventures that adopted digital technologies and had access to loans increased their performance and survival during the COVID-19 pandemic, those who failed in these aspects experienced negative performance and survival effects. Thus, although the COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted many entrepreneurial ventures and even forced some to close, others survived and even prospered during the environmental shock.

The paper sheds light on a little understood topic: entrepreneurial venture success and failure in the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study aims to investigate how relational resources, such as the buyer’s trust in its suppliers and the level of supplier involvement, affect the level of tacit knowledge integration capabilities (TKICs) of the firm, which, in turn, is hypothesized to affect business performance.

Based on the dynamic capabilities theory and the relational view, this paper examines how TKIC, a special case of dynamic capability, influences business performance. The research context is the Brazilian automobile industry, in which firms are currently experimenting with modular production and increasing their interactions with suppliers. Using a sample of automobile suppliers, this investigates how relational resources, such as the buyer’s trust in its suppliers and the level of supplier involvement, affect the level of TKIC, which, in turn, is hypothesized to affect business performance. In addition, this paper examines the moderating effect of various communication media on the TKIC-business performance relationship. The findings confirm the importance of relational resources and TKIC on business performance. Finally, this paper explores various theoretical and managerial implications to encourage future research.

The results suggested that the two relational resources (supplier involvement and buyer’s trust) are important drivers of TKICs and that the level of supplier involvement in the production process mediates the relationship between buyer’s trust and TKIC. Moreover, this study found that TKIC leads to superior firm performance, but the degree of media naturalness does not seem to facilitate knowledge transfer. The results confirm that supplier involvement is a pivotal process in that the buying firm’s internal resources and the major suppliers’ resources and capabilities are combined to achieve a competitive advantage – TKIC.

This study is subject to the typical limitations inherent in cross-sectional research designs using subjective measures. That said, this still has some important implications indicating that relational resources, such as buyer’s trust and supplier involvement, are critical in developing TKIC that “seize” opportunities from interfirm relationships and integrate knowledge across and within firm boundaries. Moreover, while knowledge management tools can resemble face-to-face interactions to the largest extent, the research suggested that it cannot substitute face-to-face communications in transferring tacit knowledge.

Managers deal with complex interactions and linkages due to tacit knowledge from components, systems and modules, which are critical in developing organizational capabilities. Relational resources are important strategic assets facilitating resource combination and coordination. Managers must coordinate among multiple sources of learning and partner with their suppliers at an earlier stage to develop the relational capabilities and efficiently steer the process of boundary redefinition. Finally, managers must have the ability to manage tacit knowledge within the interface with suppliers using organizational mechanisms (i.e. TKIC) to help them absorb external knowledge from their supplier network and integrate it with specific internal competences.

Recent disruptive technological developments pressure organizations to become more flexible by requiring firms to adapt quickly to constantly changing markets and to have the ability to apply different resources and capabilities to specific unique situations. All this with a huge impact on the firm’s employees and society in general. Thus, interfirm relationships and the role of knowledge integration is especially crucial, given the current industry trend in favor of experimenting with innovative production methods (e.g. flexible manufacturing and modular production) that can help managers to rethink work conditions in a more meaningful and flexible for society.

While prior research treats integrative capability mainly as a mechanism that explains superior firms’ performance in an interfirm relationship, few research efforts have explicated what shapes TKICs. By examining the relationship between relational resources, TKIC and performance, this study fills this research gap and develops and tests a theoretical framework.