Entrepreneurial Firms in Africa

This chapter examines the greening of large conventional firms since 1980, the acquisition of many green entrepreneurial firms, and the rise of “greenwashing.” While noting that this development appeared to signal the success of green business, and the scaling needed for sustainability to make a real impact, there were also major problems. In particular, there were frequent and large gaps between corporate rhetoric and reality, threatening consumer disillusion and making it harder for more genuinely green firms to make their distinctive case. Corporate environmentalism was also constrained by the huge pressure on firms to meet quarterly returns, making it hard for large corporations to pursue truly radical sustainability strategies.

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Learning, Dynamic Capabilities, and Firm Performance: The Case of Entrepreneurial Firms in the South Korean Fashion Industry

Entrepreneurship Research Journal ◽

10.1515/erj-2020-0098 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 0 (0) ◽

Author(s):

Kilho Shin ◽

Nitin Kumar Singh ◽

Liliana Pérez-Nordtvedt

Keyword(s):

Dynamic Capabilities ◽

Dynamic Environments ◽

Strategic Marketing ◽

Entrepreneurial Firms ◽

Product Knowledge ◽

Marketing Capabilities ◽

Fashion Industry ◽

South Korean ◽

Resource Flexibility ◽

Human Resource Flexibility

Abstract Given their small size and young age, entrepreneurial firms are resource deprived. However, to successfully compete in dynamic environments, these firms are still required to build their dynamic capabilities. Using the ever-changing Korean retail fashion industry, we suggest that entrepreneurial firms deprived of formal marketing departments can learn from their main external repositories of market and product knowledge and develop their strategic marketing (dynamic) capabilities as routines, which, in turn, improve the entrepreneurial firms’ performance. Moreover, following the microfoundations argument of dynamic capabilities, we argue that these strategic marketing capabilities in the form of routines can be further enhanced by the entrepreneurial firm’s human resource flexibility. Our data reveals support for our arguments.

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Excessive Ties in Entrepreneurship Can Hurt: How Excess Entrepreneurial Ties Bring Negative Effects to the Firm

SAGE Open ◽

10.1177/21582440211025533 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (2) ◽

pp. 215824402110255

Author(s):

Lijun Xu ◽

Yun Zhu ◽

Chuanyang Ruan ◽

Weijin Shi

Keyword(s):

Absorptive Capacity ◽

Social Ties ◽

Entrepreneurial Firms ◽

Negative Effects ◽

Environmental Complexity ◽

Entrepreneurial Performance ◽

Firm Outcomes ◽

Critical Resource ◽

Curvilinear Effect

Entrepreneurial ties are a critical resource for development and survival of entrepreneurial firms; however, the mechanism of how entrepreneurial ties affect entrepreneurial performance remains unclear. This study advances existing research on social ties and entrepreneurship through investigating how entrepreneurial ties exert a curvilinear impact on entrepreneurial performance via absorptive capacity, and the curvilinear effect of entrepreneurial ties is contingent on environmental complexity. The present study uses a dyadic dataset of 223 entrepreneurs from creativity industries in China to examine hypotheses. The results show that entrepreneurs’ ties have an inverted U-shaped impact on entrepreneurial performance. We also partially find that this inverted U-shaped relationship is mediated by absorptive capacity. Finally, we also find that this inverted U-shaped relationship is steeper when environmental complexity is high, and this inverted U-shaped relationship turns into an almost positive linear when environmental complexity is low. Overall, these results contribute to a deeper understanding of how and when entrepreneurial ties lead to a curvilinear impact on firm outcomes.

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