Contextual Strategic Entrepreneurship

This edited volume embraces counties as diverse as India to Austria. The chapters in this book depict and reveal contextual features of strategic entrepreneurship (SE) in re-conceptualizing organizational rejuvenation, barriers to SE, entrepreneurial resourced-based view, mixed embeddedness, social network marketing, competitiveness in small enterprises, strategic learning, and a triple helix approach to the business strategic cooperation with the government and university. Through these chapters, the concept of context in SE is unfolded, and it is demonstrated how the entrepreneurial strategies differ within the specific contexts in various countries, societies, and entrepreneurial ecosystems. The volume introduces the usually and widely neglected issues that the strategic decisions, planning, and formulations are greatly context-related endeavors, and hence, any true understanding of the strategy in this realm starts with a deep and appropriate understanding of the key relevant context(s).

All organizations, during their life cycle, go through different stages. In the decline stage, businesses face several problems, such as a sharp decline in sales, income, profit, performance, and competition ability. To exit from the decline stage, companies must rejuvenate themselves, which is often a costly and time-consuming process accompanied by pain. However, the concept of organizational rejuvenation as a strategic entrepreneurial phenomenon is an old but almost unknown concept.

In this chapter, a systematic literature review based on the bibliometric method has been used. Out of 400,698 articles, 7257 articles were selected using the Web of Science (WoS) database. In this research, VOSviewer software (Visualizing Scientific Landscapes) was used to analyze the articles in the field of organizational rejuvenation and the other relevant scientific domains. According to the results of cooccurrence technique, seven clusters were identified as the seven dimensions of “organizational rejuvenation”: organizational restructuring, organizational capabilities development, organizational processes improvement, implantation of business turnaround strategies, internal corporate venturing, entrepreneurial leadership development, and business rebranding. The last four components are the theoretical contribution of this chapter. Finally, some research gaps were proposed for future research.

The last three decades have seen focussed research on entrepreneurship and related strategic entrepreneurship. Organisations try to achieve global competitiveness by adopting strategic entrepreneurship. Despite having extensive benefits, we find that strategic entrepreneurship in developing countries is academically understudied. Further, due to several barriers, its adoption in practice is limited. This chapter primarily aims to identify the significant barriers towards adopting strategic entrepreneurship for the strategic management of entrepreneurial organisations. Thus, through expert inputs, twelve barriers were modelled through Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM). ISM models the interrelationship among the identified barriers so that the organisation can mitigate these barriers effectively. The most significant barriers revealed by the study were ‘strategic entrepreneurship awareness’, ‘lack of entrepreneurship culture’ and ‘limited financial support to knowledge-based firms’.

Further, in the next step, MICMAC analysis is applied to assess the identified barrier‘s driving and dependence power. These barriers are clustered into four categories, based on the driving/dependence power, namely autonomous, dependent, linkage and driver clusters. The finding of this study suggests that ‘strategic entrepreneurship awareness’, ‘lack of entrepreneurship culture’ and ‘limited financial support to knowledge-based firms’ are the most significant barriers towards the successful adoption of strategic entrepreneurship. Therefore, management needs to provide greater attention to the mentioned barriers to adopt a strategic perspective towards entrepreneurship.

There are three potential implications of this study. The first implication is that it is beneficial for the managers and policy planners to develop mitigation strategies to address these barriers. Secondly, this study is conducted in Indian organisations, and it will help Indian and other developing countries to understand the significant barriers to strategic entrepreneurship. Thirdly, the academic researchers in entrepreneurship will also get deeper insights into facilitating strategic entrepreneurship.

This chapter involves collecting and analysing data obtained by interviewing key experts covering nine framework conditions influencing the entrepreneurial ecosystem in selected African countries using the National Expert Survey (NES) questionnaire developed by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and then to use the information gathered to develop a new and innovative composite index. The purpose of a composite index is to consolidate a number of inputs that describe or are related to a phenomenon into a single summary number that is easy to interpret and to use by professional developers and policy makers. This chapter discusses the development of a national entrepreneurial context composite index (NECI) which makes use of the data collected by GEM national teams for the National Expert Survey (NES). The results for six African countries, Angola, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, Madagascar and Mozambique are given, and conclusions are drawn as to what interactions are required in each country to improve the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

This chapter looks into the sustainability factors of Barangay Micro Business Enterprises (BMBEs) in Laoag City from the Resource-Based View (RBV). Primary data were gathered through a survey questionnaire and interview. Secondary data were collected from the Department of Trade and Industry-Ilocos Norte Provincial Office and Laoag City Licensing Office. The findings show that the BMBEs in Laoag City, particularly the hotel accommodation and food service activities group, have valuable, rare, inimitable, and organized resources that sustain their operations. Having excellent local market knowledge, customer loyalty, established relationships with suppliers, owner’s motivation, daily recording of financial transactions, separating business money from personal money, and high social media presence with positive reviews are the resources that give them a sustainable competitive advantage. By maximizing these resources, they overcome the problems encountered in business operations, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Valuable and rare but can be easily imitated resource such as differentiated product provides a temporary competitive advantage. Valuable resources that are not rare and can easily be imitated, such as offering affordable meals, financial resources, employees, sales on a cash basis, and a simple organizational structure, provide competitive parity. The BMBEs should strategize to make all valuable but not rare and easily imitated resources into valuable, rare, inimitable, and organized to become a sustainable competitive advantage.

By highlighting institutional constraints and market opportunities in various environments, the mixed embeddedness approach has considerably enriched the migrant entrepreneurship debate. However, despite socio-theoretical advancements on ethnicity, gender, class and migration background, and the social construction and intersectionality of these categories, the “social embeddedness” of the population groups in question remains unchallenged by this approach. Engaging intersectional and constructivist perspectives on identity and difference, this chapter argues for a revision of the mixed embeddedness approach, in order to more strongly address the constitution of the migrant category in entrepreneurship, instead of taking it for granted.

Comparing two main shopping streets in two different Viennese districts, the chapter examines the relationship between embeddedness and agency and how both the market and the actors are entangled in a multiplicity of interdependent social relations. Simmering is a blue-collar district at the city’s fringes, while Neubau, the unofficial city center, is home to the most important shopping street in Vienna and contains an aspiring creative milieu. Both reveal a very different mix of gendered and ethnicized businesses. In this chapter, we address how the category of migrant becomes relevant in the local economies of these two distinct sites. The chapter asks the question: how are these categories articulated and how do they intersect with everyday encounters in business life and the opportunity structures there?

Customer loyalty is important for profitability of any business including banking industry. This study aims to investigate the effect of social network marketing on customer profitability in banks and to design a customer profitability model in the field of marketing. A deductive approach is used to develop the hypotheses based on existing theory. This study is a descriptive research and uses the survey method. The sample is collected from 200 potential customers from Melli banks in Hamadan Province, Iran. The simple random sampling technique is selected for this study. The data have been analyzed, using the structural equation modeling. The conclusion is that electronic word-of-mouth marketing, online brand community, online advertising, and customer brand loyalty are influencing factors on the bank customers’ profitability.

This chapterinvestigates the impact of marketing communication capability on sustainable competitive advantage by examining the mediating effect of product development and selling capabilities. It also explores the effect of information technological turbulence on the relationship between marketing communication capability and firm competitive advantage. This chapter proposes a structural equation model to empirically test the relationships between marketing communication, selling capability, product development, and sustainable competitive advantage. Drawing from the SMEs database provided by the Ministry of Cooperative and SMEs in Indonesia, the random sample adopts a self-administered mail survey for data collection. The results indicate that marketing communication capability has a positive impact on product development capability, which in turn strengthens the sales capability to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. However, high information technological turbulence reduces the effectiveness of marketing communication capability on supporting the competitive advantage. This chapter extends the dynamic capability theory by adopting information technological turbulence at various levels to explain the role of marketing communication and product development.

This chapter highlights the importance of how learning from competitors improves strategic decision making and also ameliorates the performance of entrepreneurial firms. Strategic learning is a process at the strategic level that refers to an organization’s ability to process strategic knowledge so that it can recreate its strategies. Knowledge acquisition from competitors as a creative strategic knowledge plays a major role in strategic learning in entrepreneurial firms. Using a qualitative research approach and examining eight entrepreneurial firms as case studies, this chapter outlines learning from competitors’ processes in these firms. The findings show that these firms learn from competitors in four matters: through competitive analysis, benchmarking, imitation, and social media.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate how knowledge management and university-business-government collaboration—including the three helices—relate to the performance of organizations, based on the theories of Knowledge Management and the Triple Helix, the most referenced model to deepen this kind of cooperation. In the contemporary competitive environment, the ability of organizations to create and use knowledge is becoming increasingly fundamental to the pursuit of sustainable competitive advantage, leading even to the search for new forms of interorganizational arrangements. The choice of topic is justified by the scarcity of empirical researches that relate the topics of knowledge management and university-business-government collaboration in an integrated manner. This relationship can lead to tremendous improvements for the organizations involved and for the development of society as a whole.