Relational capital and strategic orientations as antecedents of innovation: Evidence from Mexican SMEs

Questions "Where does innovation initiate in a company?" and "How can a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) leverage its different resources to enhance its innovation capabilities to outperform its competitors?" remain unanswered to date. Accordingly, this study examined the...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of innovation and entrepreneurship 2022-06, Vol.11 (1), p.1-19, Article 42
Main Authors: Ramírez-Solis, Edgar R, Llonch-Andreu, Joan, Malpica-Romero, Alberto D
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Business and Management
Competition
Competitive advantage
Economic Geography
Economic Policy
Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship
Hypotheses
Innovation
Innovations
Internal public relations
Marketing
Mexico
Relational capital
Small & medium sized enterprises-SME
SMEs
Strategic orientations
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Questions "Where does innovation initiate in a company?" and "How can a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) leverage its different resources to enhance its innovation capabilities to outperform its competitors?" remain unanswered to date. Accordingly, this study examined the relationship between the firm's relational capital and fundamental strategic orientations that a firm can adopt and how these different orientations affect innovation and organizational performance. The target sample included 360 Mexican SMEs who completed a pen-and-pencil questionnaire conducted at the four main cities of this country. Structural equation modeling was performed, and results revealed a strong positive effect of relational capital over all four strategic orientations considered in this study. However, mixed findings of strategic orientations and innovation were obtained. Although market and entrepreneurial orientation positively influenced innovation, a negative relationship was found between learning orientation and innovation and a nonsignificant relationship between technology orientation and innovation. As expected, innovation positively influenced the performance of SMEs. This study offers essential academic contributions and interesting managerial insights to improve performance using relational capital through innovation and strategic orientations. Therefore, we propose relational capital as an underexploited resource and a source of innovation for SMEs.
ISSN:2192-5372
2192-5372
DOI:10.1186/s13731-022-00235-2