بررسی اهمیت کارآفرینی در مزیت رقابتی سطح بنگاه در صنایع فن آوری های فشرده

The resource-based view of the firm (RBV) suggests that in order to attain and sustain a competitive advantage firms must possess and exploit valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources. Despite the focus on exploitation, empirical work in this area has focused primarily on resource possession. By infusing this traditional view of the RBV with ideas from the dynamic capabilities approach and the entrepreneurship literature, this paper presents conceptual arguments about the exploitation of resources through the development of specific capabilities. The empirical results suggest that entrepreneurial capacity and entrepreneurial management are important capabilities that help in building competitive advantage for firms in technologically intensive industries.

The resource-based view of the firm (RBV) assumes that resources and capabilities (hereafter referred to simply as “resources”) are heterogeneously distributed among firms, a condition that allows for the existence of differences in firm resource endowments and imperfectly mobile, a condition that allows for these differences to persist over time (Barney, 1991). Barney (1991) argues that only resources that are simultaneously valuable and rare can generate competitive advantage and that for such a competitive advantage to be sustained, the resources on which it is based must be both inimitable and non-substitutable, since otherwise the advantage could be competed away over time. While much of Barney's (1991) work relies on the notion of resource possession (that is, firms that possessed valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources would attain and sustain a competitive advantage), RBV scholars have since moved to the idea of “dynamic capabilities” whereby they argue that firms not only need to possess, but more importantly, exploit such resources (Amit and Schoemaker, 1993; Henderson and Cockburn, 1994). According to this view, past experience that is accumulated by the routines that the firm has developed by “learning by doing” allow the firm to exploit its resources uniquely (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000; Henderson and Cockburn, 1994; Teece et al., 1997; Argote, 1999). Over the course of the past decade, a growing stream of empirical research has sought to test the central tenets of RBV in the entrepreneurship field (c.f. Chandler and Hanks, 1994; Deeds et al., 1998; Chrisman, 1999; Chrisman and McMullen, 2000; Litz and Stewart, 2000; Westhead et al., 2001; Dhanaraj and Beamish, 2003; Sirmon and Hitt, 2003; Wang and Bee, 2004; Zahra et al., 2004; Powers and McDougall, 2005) and the strategic management field (c.f. Powell, 1992a and Powell, 1992b; Henderson and Cockburn, 1994; Powell, 1995; Robins and Wiersema, 1995; Maijoor and Van Witteloostuijn, 1996; Miller and Shamsie, 1996; Powell and Dent-Micallef, 1997; Russo and Fouts, 1997; Combs and Ketchen, 1999; Makadok, 1999; Yeoh and Roth, 1999; Knott, 2003). Such studies, which are intended to serve as a representative sample of the RBV-grounded empirical literature, typically correlate the amount of a given resource possessed by a firm with some measure of competitive advantage. This approach has yielded a substantial amount of empirical evidence suggesting that the competitive positions of firms are at least in part a function of the resources they possess. Yet, because resources do not exploit themselves, these findings may not tell the whole story. We argue that by including the dynamic capabilities approach and by identifying the factors that facilitate the exploitation of resources in the entrepreneurial context, scholars may be better positioned to further specify the competencies that allow the exploitation of resources. This would provide useful advice to practicing managers, in both new and small firms that lack a broad resource portfolio as well as incumbent firms seeking to enter new markets in which they lack the accepted bases of competition. This paper will provide empirical evidence regarding what firm-level factors allow entrepreneurial firms to create, reconfigure and recombine resources to create new value through innovation (Teece et al., 1997). In support, recent research suggests the value of our approach. Hult et al. (2004) and Montalvo (2006) have found that entrepreneurial orientation coupled with an ability to learn and assimilate new knowledge helps firms innovate and achieve better than average performance in high-technology industries that are volatile. The implied dynamics of their research is similar to dynamic capabilities that consist of specific organizational processes such as product development, alliancing, strategic decision-making, and the like that create value for firms within volatile markets through the manipulation of resources (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000). In developing and testing our model, we focus on firms competing in technologically intensive industries as they have been found to be among the most significant contributors to the economy in terms of their innovativeness and growth (Kirchhoff, 1994). We examine two new kinds of capabilities: entrepreneurial capacity and entrepreneurial management both of which allow firms to navigate the environmental uncertainties and learn new routines, which in turn enable firms to generate new and synergistic resource combinations (Eisenhardt and Galunic, 2000).

Based on the results presented in Table 3 and Table 4, it seems that resource access, entrepreneurial capacity, and entrepreneurial management may each be important in attaining a competitive advantage in technologically intensive industries. However, what is interesting to note is that the significance of the predictor variables in the attainment of a performance advantage over its competitors are largely dependent on the performance objective sought. Indeed, findings that the significance of resource-based explanatory variables vary as a function of the measure of performance used are not uncommon (see for example, Westhead et al., 2001) and suggest that the relationships among resources and performance may be quite complex. In short, it seems that the competencies and dynamic capabilities that a firm cultivates are useful for improving organizational performance and the access to resources facilitates better market performance. It seems that in order to improve organizational performance, firms should develop capabilities that focus around personnel issues. Specifically, firms may wish to employ individuals with an internally oriented locus of control and reward them not on the basis of pre-defined responsibilities, but rather on the basis of their value-addedness to the firm. When considering these findings in context, the fact that employees and the way they are managed are so important is not surprising. Indeed where quality, innovation, efficiency, employee satisfaction, and other internal performance measures are concerned, prior research (Malhotra, Grover and Desilvio, 1996; Hitt, Hoskisson and Nixon, 1995) suggests that factors internal to the firm will be significant. Because the human capacity of the firm is responsible for actively reconfiguring and recombining available resources in the face of disruptive change as well as providing direction for such efforts, employees with an internal locus of control (as opposed to excessive creativity) are likely valuable in such environments as they are apt to believe that their firm's performance is not stochastic and that current practices will, given the incidence of change in technologically intensive environments, soon become obsolete. Indeed, the drive and self-motivated characteristic of these individuals may provide the necessary competency to conceive of ways to reengineer existing products, services, and/or processes in order to render them more productive. Similarly, because rewards based on task accomplishment as opposed to titles, job descriptions, and the like allows individuals autonomy and creates the motivation to take initiative, management capabilities based on empowerment would be more effective at encouraging innovation and related internal performance measures in dynamic markets. Unlike the results for organizational performance, it seems that when seeking to improve market performance, firms may wish to focus primarily on access to needed resources. More specifically, it seems that access to physical resources (physical technology, plant and equipment, geographic location, and raw materials) as well as access to capabilities that enable the exploitation of both the firm's human resource's (training, experience, judgment, intelligence, and relationships of individual employees) and its organizational resources (extra-firm relationships, channels of distribution, and corporate culture) may enable firms in technologically intensive industries to attain an advantage over its competitors with respect to external indicators such as marketing, growth in sales, profitability, and market share. This confirms previous research findings where it was found that entrepreneurial ability coupled with the ability to learn and assimilate new knowledge helped firms perform well in volatile high-technology environments (Hult et al., 2004). Whereas organizational performance reflects a firm's ability to redeploy resources in order to innovate and retain entrepreneurial employees, market performance is not directly related to disruptive change. As such, it is not surprising that market performance is driven largely by relationships that enable access to physical and human resources. Indeed, the significance of physical resources and human resource capabilities can be explained by the fact that raw materials and the knowledge by which they are exploited are the two most critical inputs in technologically based products, the sales of which manifest in the majority of the market performance indicators. Similarly, since more then half of the firms are small, it is also no surprise that the ability to exploit organizational resources such as relationships with other firms is critical since such may be the only way small firms can supplement their limited resource cache. This confirms Pavitt's (1999) proposition that some types of firms may need to actively acquire skills from beyond their boundaries to boost performance. At the same time, because market performance does not directly require continual reengineering of products, services, and/or internal processes, it is not surprising that factors surrounding the reconfiguration and redeployment of these resources were found to be insignificant. Though the analysis described herein may provide some insight into the relationship between resource exploitation and performance, it is not entirely immune from certain limitations. A concern of any study that collects self-report data via one survey instrument is that it may be subject to common method bias. It is important to note that such an approach was undertaken due to the fact that the micro- and nano-technology sector in general (and the present sample in particular) contain a high percentage of small, privately held firms. Thus, accessing objective data from publicly available databases was not possible. Notwithstanding the potential for this challenge, due to both the efforts made to minimize this bias in the construction of the survey instrument (developing multi-item scales) and statistically evidence that it was not present once the data were collected (conducting the Harman's one-factor test), it is assumed that artificial response bias does not confound the results presented herein. Of course, scholars wishing to replicate this study may wish to examine publicly held firms for which secondary data may be more readily obtainable. Also, as with many studies, the sample of firms surveyed for analysis may potentially limit the generalizability of the results. Because the sample is comprised of micro- and nano-technology firms, the results are limited to firms that operate in this sector of the economy. In an effort to assess whether and to what degree the present results might be generalized beyond such firms, future scholars may wish to examine firms in other economic sectors and/or perhaps more heterogeneous samples. Notwithstanding these issues, we believe our findings may prove useful to both academics and practitioners. For academics, the identification of factors that facilitate resource exploitation provides a more dynamic understanding of how competitive advantage is attained. Specifically by placing the responsibility of creating and sustaining a competitive advantage on the entrepreneur and the manager, the current model makes the RBV more actionable. Although not all firms possess valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources; the better-performing firms can cultivate capabilities, which allow them to innovatively exploit available resources. By viewing entrepreneurs and managers as strategists entrusted with the task of utilizing potentially value-creating resources more effectively and/or innovatively than their competitors, this paper attempts to inform scholars as to the some of the capabilities in the entrepreneurial context that may facilitate the transformation of resources into competitive advantage. The present results may also prove useful to practitioners working in technology-intensive industries as well. First, they encourage the development of channels by which essential resources may be accessed and not necessarily owned. Such advice may be welcome to those technologically intensive firms that lack the time and money (or both) necessary to acquire and/or develop such resources and capabilities. Rather, such firms may wish to consider developing inter-firm networks and alliances, perhaps with large firms that possess such resources and capabilities or with small firms with which they can be co-developed. Of course, advice is not meant to discourage practitioners at such firms that lack the social capacity necessary to develop such networks as resource access appears primarily beneficial to external measures of performance. Practitioners wishing to attain an advantage or increase an existing advantage in terms of their firms’ internal operations may also wish to consider employing individuals with an internal locus of control and both rewarding them for their ability to put their creativity into action and developing avenues by which they may gain access to needed resources. Thus, the model proposed and findings presented herein may be useful in advising all firms, not just those that are resource-rich, how to achieve competitive advantage. In summary, it seems that attaining a sustainable competitive advantage in technologically intensive industries is not necessarily limited to those firms with the best existing resource endowments. Instead, new firms that may not possess a wide array of valuable, rare, inimitable, non-substitutable resources as well as those of older firms looking to diversify into new markets that may not possess the resources accepted as bases of competition in these markets may be able to take proactive steps in order to improve their competitiveness.