Considering pursuing the differentiation strategy makes enable the organization to earn its success and to create, capture and sustain economic value. Despite this importance, it is relatively absentminded in empirical studies at the conceptual level. In response to this gap, the purpose of this paper is conceptualizing differentiation strategy model, developing the instruments of differentiation strategy, and testing the relationship between dimensions of the value chain, differentiation in the supply, competitive advantages, and organizational performance, using data from a sample of 123 manufacturing organizations. On this study, quantitative methods were applied to measure the proposed relationships, and questionnaires were used as a tool in gathering primary data. Relationships proposed in the framework were tested using structural equation modeling. The results of this study indicated that pursuing the differentiation strategy leads on increasing competitive advantage and improving organizational performance. Also, it pointed out that the manufacture organizations’ success is determined by their ability to be flexible on strategic planning and on integrating internal and industrial settings factors on differentiation strategy creating. This research contributes to strategic literature clarifying a successful differentiation model helping the practitioners on increasing the ability and knowledge on pursuing the differentiation strategy.

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Overconfidence has been reported to be a common bias among entrepreneurs and might be one cause of the high failure rates observed for new ventures. In this study, we investigate the overconfidence bias in a sample of 92 Austrian entrepreneurs, who responded to a general-knowledge questionnaire. Their levels of overconfidence were assessed by their responses to hard, medium and easy knowledge questions, and the relations of individual, organizational and environmental factors to the bias score were analyzed. The results confirmed that entrepreneurs are indeed prone to expressing overprecision, a type of overconfidence, but not when answering questions of all levels of difficulty. Being a single founder instead of a co-founder was identified as a significant predictor of overconfidence. Confidence, on the other hand, was associated with age and prior entrepreneurial experience, while accuracy was determined solely by age. The results of this study only partly agree with those of previous studies conducted in different national and cultural settings.

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The prior importance of the concept of sustainability, as well as its prior developmental orientation, is one of the most challenging and prospective approaches to a more systematic and a less chaotic organizational and economic growth and development. With the process of launching the “New Global Reporting Initiative”, in August 2010, the awareness for a profound integration of the needed data and information on the model for sustainable growth emerged, consisting of a numerous initiative organizations, such as UN Global Compact and WWF, the Prince’s Accounting for Sustainable Projects, International finance and accounting standard settlers, which in fact establish a concept of comparable integrated sustainable framework. The dominant importance of the above framework is unifying the information for running the day-to-day operation in a sustainable manner, in order to emphasize the focal understanding of the sustainability as triple bottom line aspects – the balance of harmony between the economic, social and environmental sustainability. Each organizational form nowadays possesses a need for complying its performance as a dynamic, vital and alive entity, in order to shift the prevalent consideration of the human resources from a source of value creation, to a focal creative force within, as an initial step for a vivid responding to the features of the new organizational evolution. The systemic approach to planning and implementing changes is the base for the tendencies of an external adaptation and internal integration.