هوش کسب و کار و رقابت: نقش میانجی گرایی کارآفرینی Business intelligence and competitiveness: the mediating role of entrepreneurial orientation

1. INTRODUCTION In a strongly competitive, dynamic and volatile environment, firms must make the efforts to gather information needed to improve their decisions. This can be a challenge for every business but a more marked one to startups trying to get in a market (Foster, Smith, Ariyachandra, & Frolick, 2015). Business Intelligence (BI) has attracted attention because we have an increase of information available through electronic means of acquisition, processing and communication that can be used as a basis for intelligence practices. Other motive is due to the context of great worldwide political and social change, increased global competition from new or more aggressive competition, and rapid technological changes (Nasri, 2012) that requires improved information use. An increase in uncertainty leads to increasing information processing activities within firms (Dishman & Calof, 2008). If not, the survival of firms may be at risk (Shollo, 2010) As a special kind of enterprise, startups work to conquer their space in the market and grow, and, at the same time, develop competitive advantages to survive. We must note that a small firm is not a scaled-down version of larger firms. There are differences in terms of their structures, resources available, management practices, environmental response and the way they compete in the market (Man, Lau, & Chan, 2002). The resource-based view (RBV) asserts that, to develop and maintain competitive advantages companies must use their physical assets, human assets, and organizational assets which are largely intangible. (Lonial & Carter, 2015; Molina, Del Pino, & Rodriguez, 2004). An important notion of this theory is that firms controlling valuable and rare resources have the capacity to build a competitive advantage, moreover, if this resources are difficult to imitate or substitute. (Wiklund & Shepherd, 2011) BI can be seen as one of these assets that must be developed and used as a tool that can help and have great value for the gathering, analysis and dissemination of information to support better decisions. In this study we approach BI by its characteristics seen as a multidimensional construct that evaluates several aspects: Intraindustry comprehensiveness, Interindustry analysis, BI formality and Perceived usefulness. The first to are concerned with external aspects of intelligence and the other two with internal structure and use of information. This combination can give us an understanding of the intelligence efforts to support decision. In the entrepreneurship and strategy literature, Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) is commonly pointed as having a positive effect on performance. Although, according with Wiklund and Shepherd (2011:929) “the majority of research on the topic implicitly assumes that EO somehow provides an advantage to firm”. Several studies suggest a relation between Entrepreneurial orientation and performance or competitiveness aspects, but according to Wang (2008) simply examining the direct EO- performance relationship provides an incomplete picture. The need to control for internal and external factors that can influence this relationship is pointed as an important research path and different studies try to explore different factors (Gunawan, Jacob, & Duysters, 2016; Real, Roldán, & Leal, 2014; Shirokova, Bogatyreva, Beliaeva, & Puffer, 2016; Wang, 2008; Wiklund & Shepherd, 2003).