Strategic alliance research emerged to explain alliance formation based upon transaction cost minimisation and opportunism reduction. Later research, and early research from Japan, emphasised the role of alliances in facilitating the transfer of knowledge between organisations. Most recently, alliance research has focussed on the development of shared, potentially idiosyncratic, resource stocks. This paper builds on this recent research, testing the proposition that alliances are important vehicles allowing firms to access or acquire external resources, hence shoring up capability gaps and building new capabilities as required during firm, product and industry life cycles. Using a sample from Australian manufacturing small-and-medium-sized enterprises, the paper reveals that alliances employed by firms can be viewed as initiatives to either fill a gap in the firm's resource stock or to exploit a perceived opportunity in its operational and strategic environment.

The goal of this study is to illustrate the variance pattern of competitive advantage. On the basis of an a priori model drawing on the Schumpeterian factors mediating the effects of innovation investment on firm performance, this paper conducts a Multiple Indicator Multiple Cause analysis on the intertemporal competitive advantage. The results suggest that the composition of sustainable competitive advantage is a series of short-term advantages. Either sustaining or creating competitive advantage requires concomitant interaction between innovation and effective market engagement. This paper highlights innovative efficiency of such interaction as an influence on a firm's evolution of market fitness in the marketplace.

The confusion concerning the theoretical roots of the dynamic capabilities view and the fact that it was often being positioned as an extension to the resource-based view in strategic management, prompted a paper by Galvin, Rice, and Liao (2014) that suggested that the dynamic capabilities view would benefit from adopting a more explicit Darwinian approach. In response to this paper, Arndt and Bach (2015) highlighted that the seminal papers in the field do indeed take an evolutionary perspective and that in operationalizing the variation-selection-retention cycle in an empirical setting it is necessary to move away from firm performance as a dependent variable and instead use survival, which more closely aligns with the concept of natural selection. In this paper, we respond to this recent critique to articulate the benefits of a Darwinian nomenclature and how this will assist in positioning the dynamic capabilities view as an independent, though complementary, theory to the resource-based view. However, we do clearly recognize that until the key terms of variation, selection and retention can be operationalized at the routine, firm and industry level, such an approach may not in itself bring the field towards a common understanding of how dynamic capabilities operate in different environments.

The Darwinian logic of evolution occurring via the mechanisms of variation, selection and retention provides a possible theoretical framework from which to further develop the dynamic capabilities view. Presently, criticized for lacking a theoretical foundation and featuring a degree of confusion concerning how it aligns with the resource-based view, the dynamic capabilities view would benefit from greater clarity concerning its assumptions, theoretical base and the development of a series of testable predictions. We test elements of a potential Darwinian style framework through variation-focused hypotheses using panel data for 190 Australian service firms. Our results highlight the importance of market development as a basis for variation, however, the impact of dynamic capabilities upon a likely antecedent of selection was not clear and highlighted a nuanced relationship between capability development, market development and sales growth in an small-and-medium-sized enterprise environment. We conclude that applying a Darwinian lens to the dynamic capabilities view is challenging without longer time series data and additional measures, but such an approach remains theoretically attractive and further investigation may help clarify how we conceptualize the relationship between the dynamic capabilities view and resource based view.

This article develops and tests a model integrating dynamic organisational capabilities, market transformation arrangements and firm performance. This model addresses weaknesses in previous empirical research by integrating accumulation and path dependency in measures of dynamic capabilities. Using a sample of 444 small and medium-sized Australian manufacturing firms, the study finds that performance is driven by the successful deployment of dynamic capabilities; such performance is mediated by purposeful market transformation strategies.

Innovation-related activities within firms have traditionally been viewed as primary drivers of product and service differentiation and hopefully firm performance. Such views assume the effective transfer of newly developed products or services to a market willing to transact for the innovative products at a price that sustains the research, development and commercialisation processes behind the initial investments. In this paper, we 'unpack' this model linking primary R&D and related activities, the steps taken within the firm's market and transform its operational presence, and measures of firm performance. Using a sample of 449 Australian manufacturing companies from the Business Longitudinal Survey from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the paper develops a mediated model by which we examine the impact of innovation on firm performance mediated through a firm's market engagement and transformation strategies. This paper finds that organisational performance is driven by innovation only when mediated through these transformation outcomes. The results contribute to the innovation literature in finding that innovation-related activities can only drive a firm's competitive advantage when they occur concomitantly with actual changes in the market position and offerings of firms.

Training and development of employees increases the value and breadth of employee capabilities and knowledge, although this improvement, we suggest, cannot drive improved competitive performance in the absence of effective commercialisation of these capabilities. We propose and test a model of training and organisational performance, mediated by effective market engagement and transformation by firms.We find, as we anticipate, no direct link between training and performance, although there is a significant and positive path between training and performance when mediated through effective and contemporaneous market engagement.