قابلیت های عملیاتی و فرصت های کارآفرینی در شرکت های در حال ظهور: توضیح صادرات رشد SME Operational capabilities and entrepreneurial opportunities in emerging market firms: Explaining exporting SME growth

Introduction It has become a truism that exporting is the most popular market entry strategy because it requires less commitment of organisational resources and results in higher strategic and organisational flexibility. For these reasons, exporting presents one of the most viable ways to grow for small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs). In such a manner, SMEs that export to foreign markets achieve increased sales revenues and profits through recognition and exploitation of new international venture opportunities. By diversifying their geographic market presence, exporting SMEs are able to offset sales when local markets are in downturn (OECD, 2009). Research on export competitiveness has been dominated by studies subscribing to the resource-based view (RBV) that stress the importance of resources and capabilities for firm’s export success (Morgan, Kaleka and Katsikeas, 2004; Morgan, Katsikeas and Vorhies, 2012; Fang and Zou, 2009; Kaleka, 2012). However, SMEs inevitably encounter liability of smallness and typically have insufficient resource capacities for international venturing (Knight and Cavsugil, 2004). As a result, some authors offered theoretical arguments that exporting SMEs should rely on organisational learning processes in order to generate above-average performance returns (Autio, Sapienza and Almeida, 2000; De Clerq, Crijns and Sapienza, 2005). In response to these growing inquiries, the field of operational capabilities (hereafter OCs) has witnessed growing intellectual exploration within exporting research (Morgan, Katsikeas and Vorhies, 2012; Jantunen et al., 2005; Tan and Sousa, 2015). OCs represent organisational abilities that allow a firm to ‘make a living’ (Winter, 2003) and they do this typically by two realizing competitive advantage via improved processes whereby reducing firm costs (Kaleka, 2002). OCs are therefore an indispensible source of firm competitiveness because of difficulties in acquiring and imitating them In concert to this stream of capabilities research, the growing burgeoning international entrepreneurship literature outlines that superior performance and growth in international markets should be attributed to proactive entrepreneurial posture (Gabrielsson, Gabrielsson and Dimitratos, 2014; McDougall and Oviatt, 2005; Oviatt and McDougall, 1994; Zahra et al., 2005; Zhou, Barnes and Yuan, 2010). This theoretical perspective is built around the concept of entrepreneurial opportunity (Mainela, Puhakka and Servais, 2014). According to this stream of research, the above average performance is achieved by firm’s increased entrepreneurial opportunity recognition capacity and higher rate of opportunity exploitation (De Clerq, Crijns and Sapienza, 2005; Ireland et al., 2009; Zahra, Korri and Yu, 2005).