صلاحیت شرکت در موفقیت ورود به بازار: شواهدی از صنعت فن آوری بالا در بازارهای نوظهور

This study explores the effects of three firm competencies, namely, business network, new product development (NPD), and marketing management on market entry success of a high-tech industry in an emerging market. Business network encompasses research and development (R&D) partnership, inter-organizational network, and government relationship (guanxi). NPD consists of R&D capability and product process innovation, while marketing management encompasses distribution channel, promotion, branding, and information management. Using data from 55 biopharmaceutical multinational companies in China, this study applies structural equation modeling technique with confirmatory factor analysis for testing and estimating relationships. We find that only marketing directly influences entry success, whereas the other two yield indirect effects. Our study also suggests the critical role of business network as a prerequisite for entry process. Simultaneously, NPD serves as the driving force of marketing through the creation of product competitiveness.

As the largest emerging economy, China becomes the most important investment destination (Gassman & Han, 2004). China has even overtaken the USA as the biggest recipient of foreign direct investment, rising to US$53 billion in 2002 and reaches US$92.4 billion in 2008. Although there was a slight dip in 2009 due to global slowdown, 2010 has again seen increasing up to US$105.7 billion (Mofcom, 2011). Investment in hi-tech industry also shows similar result. Liu and Daly (2011) claim that from 1995 to 2008, a significant investment transformation from low-tech to hi-tech industry happened. The share of foreign total exports from China over the period increased significantly more in hi-tech (46.8% to 62.9%) compared with low-tech products (43.3% to 54%). As part of this total export, the medical and pharmaceutical sector showed a significant increase from 21.9% to 37%. The catalyst for entry success of the high-tech industry in emerging market has received attention in international business, where many researchers underline the critical role of firm competencies to enhance entry success. Further, existing studies have discussed the types of competencies needed but only in a limited scope. Subramaniam and Venkrataman (2001) highlight NPD and innovation, others are exploring marketing (Jaworski and Kohli, 1993, Salomo et al., 2008 and Vorhies et al., 2009), or business networks (Lee, 2007, Li, 2005, Nielsen, 2005 and Yang, 1998). Broader studies are simultaneously observing NPD and marketing (Aydin et al., 2007, Bruni and Verona, 2009 and Song et al., 2005), investigating business networks and product process innovation (Pittaway et al., 2004, Ritter and Gemunden, 2004 and Zhou, 2010), or exploring networking and marketing (Fan, 2007 and Yu et al., 2011). From these studies we find that researchers concern with the roles of networking, NPD, and marketing, and also find that these competencies are indirectly related. Based on this, we argue that it is necessary to conduct a further study which simultaneously covers three competencies, the interplay among them, and analyze how they affect entry success. To achieve this, we apply structural equation modeling technique to explore the effects of competencies on entry success. We choose China to represent emerging market because it is the largest market in the world in this regard (Gassman and Han, 2004 and Luo, 2001a), while biopharmaceutical is chosen since it is considered as a representative setting of the high-tech industry due to its strongly science based, nimble, innovative characteristics, and within the industry — the firms are far more radical than in other industries (Gans & Stern, 2004). We organize the rest of the paper as follows. In the next section, we review the literature and propose hypotheses that link firm competencies with entry success. Next, we explain the sample, measurement, and analytic techniques to test the hypothesis. Subsequently, we present and discuss the findings. Finally, we outline theoretical and practical implications to Asian business, and provide future research directions.

This study has identified and integrated three firm competencies, justified their relationships, and analyzed their effect on market entry success. First, we highlight the significant level of indicators as the construct measures. Three sum scale indicators (R&D partnership, inter-organizational network, and government relationship/guanxi) significantly measure the business network as indicated by its high standardized loading factors (0.71, 0.89, and 0.91). NPD is significantly measured by the sum scale of R&D capability (0.94) and the product process innovation (0.51). Marketing management is significantly measured by the sum scale of distribution channel (0.87), marketing promotion (0.82), branding (0.83), and information management (0.78), whereas the market entry success is significantly measured by a sum scale of three items (timing, entry mode, and market coverage) with a standardized loading factor of 0.57. Second, business network yields an indirect effect to market entry success for 0.44, also yields direct effect on NPD (0.68) and marketing management (direct: 0.57; indirect: 0.3; total effect: 0.87). These findings are consistent with several studies. In terms of the relationship between business network and NPD, Pittaway et al. (2004) show evidence of significant relationship between networking and product process innovations, while Lee et al. (2001) highlight the partnership with the government, R&D center, university, and other institutions as positively supporting the internal capabilities of a firm. Our interviews with two experts revealed that the university provides MNC state-of-art information, and supports to advance biomedical research, which leads to product development and invention. Networking with the other firms (i.e., suppliers, distributors) may leverage efficient and effective business operations. Networking with the government can provide benefits because it can support a firm in the product approval process, patent application, hospital arrangement (i.e., hospitality listing, bidding process, pricing), reimbursement, and payment issues. Moreover, in terms of the relationship between business network and marketing management, we highlight a similar finding with Yu et al. (2011). Their study empirically demonstrates the significant role of network cohesion in marketing alliances in helping a firm conduct business operation successfully in international markets. Ritter and Gemunden (2004) state that when a firm fails in managing networking, thus its strategic flexibility will be limited to in-house resources. This limitation, however, would be inefficient given the increasing pace of change in contemporary markets and the complexity of new technologies. Despite the consistency with previous studies, our study even further reveals the total effect of business network to marketing management is higher (0.87) than that of NPD (0.68). These findings, therefore, are rational. First, most of the MNCs involved in this study are mostly leading in technology and own internal research centers. With these strengths, firms tend to enhance networking to support marketing. Second, the fragmented market condition makes firms harder to reach. Hence, the capability to develop network for enhancing marketing capability is beneficial. A surprising result shows that business network does not directly affect market entry success. One possible explanation is networking becomes a prerequisite for building partnerships (Ritter & Gemunden, 2004). This finding then leads us to broaden the understanding that having business networking is not enough to ensure entry success. Nevertheless, the capability of a firm in utilizing networks to build a partnership that can leverage the competencies of the firm is more critical. Our findings also explain why Lee et al. (2001) do not find an expected direct relationship between networking and the startup firm performance, where we further found that networking only yields indirect effect on the firm performance through internal capability enhancement. Third, only marketing management significantly produces direct effects to market entry success (0.51). This finding, therefore, is different from the studies of Song et al. (2005) and Aydin et al. (2007), which highlight that technology, NPD, and marketing significantly affect firm performance. However, Song et al. (2005) claim that in the high-tech industry with low technologically turbulent environment such as biopharmaceutical, marketing capabilities create greater effects on a firm's performance. Once again, this explains why this study shows that marketing competence significantly affects entry success, while NPD does not. Fourth, how can NPD affect entry success? NPD yields indirect effect to market entry success (0.23), and directly supports marketing management (0.45), which in turn can affect entry success. This finding is in line with the studies of Bruni and Verona (2009) and Arora and Nandkumar (2011). Even though NPD competence enables a firm to gain competitiveness in an emerging market, NPD as a standalone, is not sufficient to sustain advantage over time. Thus, in a high-tech industry, the attention to develop marketing capabilities might turn into a source of uniqueness or rarity (Bruni & Verona, 2009). As we focus on market entry of high-tech industry in emerging market, our study provides the following contributions to current literatures on Asian businesses. First, while previous studies only focus on partial observations on networking, NPD, and marketing, we have successfully integrated those three competencies. This result offers a more comprehensive perspective to understanding the needed firm competencies. Second, since the nature of emerging markets, such as China, is a focal point for foreign high-tech investment, our study even further defines the significant role of each competence to achieve market entry success. (i) we underline the role of business network competence as the prerequisite that helps firms enhance NPD and marketing capabilities through cooperation with both local and foreign partners, and (ii) we recognize the role of NPD as the driving force to marketing through the creation of product competitiveness. Third, we find that only marketing competence directly affects entry success and this finding strengthens previous partial studies in marketing that highlight the significant importance of marketing in emerging market to a firm's success. In terms of practical implications, this study suggests that foreign firms need to exert effort to develop the three competencies to succeed in entering high-tech industry in emerging markets. As the previous explanations underline the business network as a prerequisite while NPD and marketing come in second, we can further highlight this finding as a guide to the process sequence in developing competencies. Further, as in reality firms may have different starting points of key competence, hence this study provides insights for firms to be able to understand the interactions among the three competencies (i.e., BN → NPD; BN → MM; NPD → MM; MM → MES), and to use it as a reference of what and how to intensify current competence, and what and how to develop the needed new competence in order to achieve entry success. Despite these contributions, this study has some limitations. First, due to time and budget constraints, our study only captured 55 firms as samples, with only one survey respondent from each firm. Though we chose respondents from top management with relevant expertise, having more respondents from different levels in each MNCs will minimize measurement errors on perceptions of respondents. Second, this study uses non-financial indicators to measure entry success, thus we suggest further research to explore other indicators such as market share and product range. In addition, a further study that uses financial indicators as entry success factors is also possible. Thus, we can investigate if the results will have similar findings.