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The present study focuses on strategic factors underlying the adoption of radical product innovations in SMEs. It investigates whether market focus, technological posture and entrepreneurial orientation lead to the adoption of more radical product innovations. The study provides some new evidence on this issue drawing upon data collected from Greek SMEs in the food and beverages industry. More specifically, a logistic regression model is applied to analyse the choice between radical as against incremental product innovations. Empirical results appear to support the claim that it is mainly entrepreneurial orientation that favours the choice of radical product innovations. This suggests that in SMEs the notion of entrepreneurial-push outweighs both market-pull and technology-push arguments. The findings are discussed in the context of Greece, taking into account the specific conditions prevailing. Apart from providing some new evidence in the important area of SMEs, they have also important implications for managers and policy-makers. In addition, they encourage further theoretical and empirical investigation.

Organisational innovativeness is a broad concept involved in a firm’s proclivity to innovate. As such, widely varying conceptualisations and operationalisations of this construct appear to be the main cause of major deficiencies in the research of organisational innovativeness determinants. This article suggests a shift in emphasis from organisational to product innovativeness. After defining this concept, it selectively addresses how the investigation of product innovativeness as a dependent variable could contribute to further research and theory development. The benefits of such an investigation are far from restricted to the recommendations made herein. However, such recommendations are meant to intrigue scholars into conducting similar investigations on product innovativeness, a rather overlooked aspect of organisational innovativeness.

Purpose – This article aims to describe the valuable work conducted most recently on competitive strategies. Its purpose is to elaborate on suggestions for theorizing the hybrid form of competitive advantage and stimulate the interest of scholars. Design/methodology/approach – As this article emphasizes hybrid strategies, both electronic and manual methods have detected 15 studies focusing on competitive strategies and their relation to firm performance from 2000 until today. Findings – This article underlines the need to deal more thoroughly with combined-emphasis competitive strategies, which have seriously enhanced Porter’s paradigm, defined in 1980 with three single-emphasis strategic choices. The era in which combining competitive strategies was synonymous with stuck-in-the-middle alternatives has been left behind, and the era in which hybrid strategies suggest the most attractive choices, at least in some circumstances, has already begun. Originality/value – This article is one of the few stressing conceptual issues of hybrid strategies that emerged from Porter’s (1980) model. No matter how many years pass by, research on competitive strategies will continue, as it considers businesses of any age, size, sector or country. The global challenge of today is how scholars will revise theory to better capture reality. This article intensifies the need for a theoretical framework embracing the full variety of competitive strategies, namely, single-emphasis, mixed-emphasis, no-distinctive-emphasis and stuck-in-the-middle. Nonetheless, due to their complex and multidimensional nature, hybrid strategies receive particular attention.

Due to the recently articulated need for a better understanding of product innovativeness determinants, this study focuses on firm-specific factors that influence the innovativeness level of new products. A path analysis model pertaining to a dataset of 150 manufacturing SMEs in Greece is applied to examine customer and technology orientations' direct effects on product newness to customers on the one hand and their indirect effects through learning orientation on new product uniqueness on the other. Empirical results indicate that technology orientation is more important than customer orientation in explaining product newness to customers and thus increases the chances of the firm producing a new product beyond their experiences and consumption patterns. They also suggest that learning orientation being enhanced by stronger customer and technology orientations constitutes a key organisational capability in creating more unique new products for the market. These findings are discussed in the context of Greek SMEs in the food & beverages and textile industries, taking into account the specific conditions prevailing. Apart from providing some new evidence in the important area of SMEs, this study also reveals interesting implications for managers and policymakers while providing potential avenues for further investigation.