1,721,336 research outputs found
Between supply and demand: Intermediaries, social network and the construction of quality in the Italian Wine Industry
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Strategic orientation and performance of service firms: evidence from the Italian hotel industry
No full textDue to fierce competition in the marketplace, globalization, and an explosion of technology in recent years, the strategic orientation – “the overall strategic direction of the company and the need to design new initiatives” (Okumus, 2001) – is considered as a necessity for every company in order to achieve market success and sustain a competitive advantage. Despite a large number of studies, which have paid attention to service organization, empirical works related to the impact of strategic orientation on the hotels’ performance is still quite scarce. However, due to the constant change and increasing competitive pressures on today’s hotel industry, a deep analysis concerning the strategic orientation adoption and its impact on the performance could be very interesting. In fact, demanding customers, new regulations, globalization, and the destabilizing effects of technological advancement change the hotel landscape significantly and are introducing new challenges and imposing hotels to be innovative, accelerate their learning activities and develop long-term relationships with their customers. In summary, in view of the nature of the hotel industry, a more strategic-oriented approach might be especially required of them for improved performance.
In this paper, we examine the impact of strategic orientation upon hotels’ performance in Italy. We adopt a multidimensional conceptualization of strategic orientation to acknowledge the input of entrepreneurial, learning, and market orientations (Miller, 1983). An entrepreneurial orientation combines innovative, proactive, and risk-seeking behavior that create value in organizations. A learning orientation is based on market, technological, and social aspects that constitutes a significant internal organization value that can explain the hotels’ performance. A market orientation is the “degree to which the business unit obtains and uses information from customers, develops a strategy which will meet customer needs, and implements that strategy by being responsive to customers' needs and wants” (Ruekert, 1992). Differently from the majority of the studies, we adopt a multidimensional approach to strategic orientation, in an attempt to highlight the importance of all three dimensions. This interpretation highlights that a hotel needs to possess these different, interrelated elements if it is to achieve superior performance. Starting from the idea that hotels differ in their strategic orientations, we analyze how different strategic orientations influence the hotels’ performance. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 120 hotels operating in Rimini, an Italian mature tourism destination. Inferential statistics based on a probit regression model allows us to ascertain if strategic orientation can be considered as the most important driver of a successful lodging firm. The dependent variable is the performance of hotels. The independent variables are innovation (entrepreneurial orientation), customer-based services offered by hotels (market orientation) and learning propensity by leveraging collaborations (learning orientation). We also take into account the effects of quality (stars hotel) and size (number of rooms).
Our results verify that both innovation and customer orientation significantly influence the hotels’ performance, while learning orientation does not influence the performance. Thus our results confirm first of all that the current competitive business environment where hotels have to act calls for a continuous emphasis on delivering superior quality products and services; second, that innovativeness must be seen as one of the most important entrepreneurial orientations for hotels to achieve long-term success. On one hand, our result reinforce the marketing theorists view that hotels which focus their activities on the needs of their customers, i.e., behave in a customer-oriented way, perform better than those hotels that do not. On the other one, the findings of this study reveal that the hotels, which are very innovative, are likely to enhance their business performance. The not significant influence of learning activities based on external networks on hotels’ performance can be justified by the scarce traditional attitude of hotels in Italy to collaborate. These results assume a greater relevance if we consider that in our empirical settings the size of hotels has a negative influence in their performance, that is the smaller the hotel, the larger its performance.
In turn, this research discloses several fundamental topics that deserve further attention from international entrepreneurship scholars interested in tourism and in particular in hotel industry. First, our results demonstrate the importance of a multidimensional approach to strategic orientation when we are studying the hotels’ performance effects. Second, the current study’s emphasis is designed to provide hotel managers with more understandable guidelines on specific entrepreneurial, learning and market activities identify opportunities and create a set of resources trough which prospects can be exploited along with openness to new strategic ideas and their consequences. Third, this study suggests that, to improve performance, marketing and entrepreneurial orientation should be encouraged by managers and owners in the hotel industry and particularly if they perceive innovativeness and customer relationships in terms of openness to new ideas as an integral part of corporate strategy. Finally, evidence from this study also points to the importance of strategic emphasis on the creation of an internal business environment conducive to innovative activities, focusing on the needs of the customer
De-internationalization effects and the moderator role of distances: a longitudinal study on High-Tech Born Global Firms
No full textThis study investigates the de-internationalization process of born global (BG) firms, specifically examining how a reduction in
geographic scope affects the international scale in the remaining foreign markets. Our research addresses two key questions:
(1) Does the reduction of a BG's scope impact its scale in remaining foreign countries? (2) How do various distances (psychic,
market size, and technological) moderate this relationship? Drawing on a sample of BGs from the Italian high-tech cluster
"Tiburtina Valley," we conducted a longitudinal analysis over three periods: 2010, 2015, and 2021. Our findings suggest that a
decrease in geographic scope can positively impact the scale of remaining international activities, as measured by export value
and the number of foreign customers. This phenomenon is driven by the efficient allocation of resources, allowing BGs to
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concentrate on fewer but more profitable markets. Furthermore, the study reveals that psychic, market size, and technological
distances play significant moderating roles. The positive effects of de-internationalization strategy on the international scale is
lower when the remaining countries are more psychic and technological distant. This research contributes to the literature on
BGs by highlighting the non-linear and intermittent nature of their internationalization process, challenging the assumption of it
The Legitimation of Peripheral Producers’ Novelty by External Audiences: The Contingent Role of Consultants
Full text linkAre radically novel practices more likely to attract recognition when the evaluating audience is composed of external evaluators? Our baseline argument asserts that radical novelty is more likely to be positively evaluated by an external audience and that peripheral (rather than core) producers have higher incentives to adopt novel practices that depart from tradition. Yet, because peripheral producers often lack the necessary support and legitimacy to promote novelty, audiences play a critical role in recognizing their innovative efforts. How can peripheral producers mitigate the challenges associated with novelty recognition? To answer this question, we explore how peripheral producers’ collaboration with acclaimed consultants affects the process of external audience recognition in the context of the Italian wine field from 1997 to 2006. Our findings suggest that radical novelty is positively received by an external audience composed of critics, although we do not find a significant difference between core and peripheral producers. However, external audiences are more open to recognizing peripheral producers’ use of novel practices when they collaborate with well-connected consultants. We find that the use of central consultants produces a “boosting” effect that accentuates the differences between evaluations of peripheral producers who embrace novelty and evaluations of those that follow the tradition. Our study thus advances theory by providing empirical evidence of the value of considering third-party actors such as consultants, who sit at the nexus between the agency required for innovation and external audiences’ recognition of novelty, when studying novelty evaluation and recognition
The Impact of Strategic Orientations on the Born Globals’ Export Performance: An Ambidexterity Approach
Full text linkAccording to international entrepreneurship scholars, the success of Born Globals
(BGs) depends on their capacity to develop an organizational ambidexterity perspective, i.e. a dual function of simultaneous knowledge exploration and exploitation. In this respect, it has been pointed out that ambidexterity can be associated
with the ability to balance the development of different strategic orientations (SOs),
namely, entrepreneurial orientation (EO), market orientation (MO), and learning
orientation (LO). While several authors have investigated the impact of MO, EO
and LO on BGs’ performance, the results of such research are often inconsistent.
Based on the resource orchestration view, we assume that the combined – rather
than the single – contribution of resources and capabilities provided by EO, MO,
and LO, ultimately result in a superior export performance. Such an indicator is
typically adopted to evaluate international performance, especially for micro and
small companies. More specifically, the study aims to verify the significance of dyadic (namely, MO*EO, EO*LO, and MO*LO) and triadic (MO*EO* LO) interactions of the SO typologies on BGs’ export performance. Moreover, the paper aspires
to verify if some of these interactions are more relevant than others. We test our
hypotheses on a sample of 100 Italian hi-tech BGs located inside a technological
cluster near Rome through a longitudinal analysis. Our findings show that all the
investigated interactions positively and significantly impact on the BGs’ export performances, independently of the adopted measurement variable. However, a certain
type of hierarchy emerges among the different impacts of the investigated interactions among the three SO typologies
Firm ownership and internationalisation: Is it context that really matters?
Full text linkThis paper considers the potential role played by different kinds of
shareholders in a firm’s international level, distinguishing the firms quoted in
the UK from those listed in the countries of Continental Europe (France,
Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain). Our results confirm that different kinds of
ownership affect the overall level of a firm’s internationalisation. Family
ownership has a negative impact on foreign sales in the UK but not in
Continental Europe, while bank ownership has a negative impact on the scope
of FDI in Continental Europe but no impact whatsoever in the UK. Institutional
investors positively impact the scope of both foreign sales and FDI in the UK,
while in Continental Europe they have a negative impact on foreign sales.
These different results contribute to explaining why previous studies that have
focused on just one country or a single measurement of internationalisation
have come up with such contrasting results
Professional emergence and boundary work in the Italian wine industry: ‘Nella botte piccola c’è il vino buono’
No full textMarco Bottura, Raffaele Corrado, Bernard Forgues, and Vincenza Odorici focus on the issue of field-level change by discussing the transformation of the Italian wine industry. Conceptually, apart from different strands of institutional thought, they make particular use of the sociology of professions and the concept of boundary objects in the social studies of science and technology. By applying network analysis, they show the emergence of a new field structure where experts, consultants, ratings and rankings increasingly shape the field. Professional winemakers are of outstanding importance here, as they spread their expert knowledge throughout the network and connect wineries and, ultimately, their products in a hitherto unknown way
Early internationalizing ventures facing aging and sizing: international growth, entrepreneurial and market orientation,
No full textIntroduction:
In the last twenty years, the number of new ventures that show an international approach since from their inception has been strongly increased. These kind of ventures, defined as International New Ventures -(INV) (Oviatt and McDougall 1994), Born Global Companies ((Knight, 1997; Knight and Cavusgil, 1996; Madsen and Servais, 1997) or Global Start-Ups (Rialp et al. 2005; Jones and Coviello 2005), have attracted the attention of researchers for their different approach to internationalization that differs from the traditional models (Coviello and Jones 2004; Zahra and George 2002; Romanello R and Chiarvesio M (2019)
Following Oviatt and McDougall (1994) we conceptualized INVs “...a business organization that, from inception, seeks to derive significant competitive advantage from the use of resources and the sale of outputs in multiple countries” (p. 49). Several variables have been considered in the international entrepreneurship (IE) as strategic factors explaining the growth and the profitability of INV. However, we have little knowledge about how some dimensions of strategic orientation, such as entrepreneurial and market orientation (respectively EO e MO), are interconnected with the international growth of IVN (Agndal, Chetty, & Wilson, 2008; Coviello, 2006; Prashantham & Birkinshaw, 2015)
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