Managerial Competence, Relationship Quality and Competitive Advantage among SME Exporters

Linking Entrepreneurial Skills and Opportunity Recognition with Improved Food Distribution in the Context of the CPEC: A Case of Pakistan

“…Within this context, market, innovation and entrepreneurship orientation provide farmers with sufficient capabilities to overcome borne menaces in agriculture sector, as many studies [36,117,118] explored that nascent agriculture entrepreneurs are aggressive to goals, flexible in decision making, adapting to technological developments, proactive to market signals and yield superior economic performance [119]. As noted by Ismail, Domil [37], there is vast room for nascent entrepreneurs to grow faster and gain sizable expansion and this is very true in the case of the present study settings. Although, the agriculture sector in the country has been unprivileged, underutilized and prone to lower farmers' entrepreneurial skills, with the emergence of the CPEC in the form of a new opportunity, farmers' role is aligned to reap benefits from such avenues complemented by increased performance at the farm and in the market.…”

“…Likewise, in Malaysia, Ismail [36] notes a significant role of farmers' skills and innovation orientation in seeking trade advantage and internationalization. Further, Ismail, Domil [37] in another study on Malaysia, argue that there is vast room for budding, but resource-constrained, entrepreneurs to grow faster and gain sizable business expansion in internationalization. Cannavale and Nadali [38] examined the role of entrepreneurial orientation and farmers performance in Iran and complement that EO equips farmers with knowledge-based market information which enhances their risk-taking ability and leads to improved performance.…”

Bridging Intellectual Capital and SMEs Internationalization through the Lens of Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In what concerns the values bounding the conceptual framework-in line with Webster and Watson [57]-it is our belief that the multicriteria approach of the triad intellectual capital-SMEs internationalization-sustainable competitive advantage would become a good starting point for other scholars to make sense of the accumulated knowledge in the field via the multidisciplinary perspectives, beginning with the topic's central ideas towards the related key findings and relationships among variables. Hereby, the identified research areas which mainstream the relationship between intellectual capital and SMEs internationalization through the lens of sustainable competitive advantage fall under the following main directions and/or conceptual frameworks: (a) strategic alliances, e.g., [18,36,63,64], (b) social and business networks, e.g., [8,50,51,65,66], (c) business skills, e.g., [36,46,55,67], (d) pursue or achievement of sustainable competitive advantage, e.g., [19,36,68,69], (e) SMEs performance, e.g., [13,29,50,70], (f) family-owned business, e.g., [24,[71][72][73][74], (g) prior international experience, e.g., [55,[75][76][77], (h) knowledge transfer, e.g., [12,78,79], (i) institutional/governmental programs, e.g., [19,47,80,81], (j) business/organizational innovation, e.g.,…”

Export promotion programmes and SMEs’ performance

“…Such relationships often help SMEs overcome entry barriers to foreign markets by giving them access to their importers' cross-cultural, technical, and commercial competencies (Kim and Hemmert, 2016) Equally, relationships with business partners could be a source of innovation which would then constitute an important predictor of export performance (Boso et al, 2013;Nalcaci and Yagci, 2014). Moreover, Ismail et al (2014) found that the relationship quality with importers significantly increases the exporters' competitive advantages in terms of cost, product and service. In Chile, Maldifassi and Caorsi (2014) found that having allies in the host country was amongst the export success factors of SMEs.…”