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 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.

While 'open innovation' is often considered to be an organisational strategy with universal application, its generalisability and applicability to organisations operating within emerging economies has yet to be fully explored. This study provides empirical evidence of its importance within a substantial sample of Chinese large firms and small and medium enterprises. Using Tobit regression analysis, our findings indicate that external knowledge sources from inter-firm networking are more important in creating the benefits of open innovation for Chinese small and medium enterprises than their larger peers. Linkages to university and research institutes generally have few direct effects on the innovation performance of both large and small firms in China. However, the role of universities and research institutes is shown to be important among our large firm sample when combined with evident internal absorptive capacity. This interaction is generally limited to our large firm sample, and is not as evident among small firms.

The adoption of open innovation creates a dilemma for firms. On one hand, a commitment to openness facilitates the flow of knowledge between firms, with this flow (generally) unconstrained by royalties and other appropriation mechanisms. However, openness has also led to unintended knowledge spillovers, limiting firms' abilities to protect their core knowledge. This dilemma has created a need to consider the relationship between openness and firms' appropriability regimes. In order to explore this "paradox of openness," an investigation of the appropriability regimes adopted by Australian firms through an empirical analysis of innovation-related data from 4 322 businesses was undertaken. It was found that the relationship between two indicators of openness (the breadth of external knowledge sources and the scope of interorganizational collaborations) and the scope of appropriability regimes employed by a firm exhibits a nonlinear inverse-U (n) form. The results also indicated that open innovators actually increase controls on their intellectual property through informal appropriability regimes rather than loosening appropriability mechanisms to promote knowledge spillovers as open innovation theories suggest.

This study sets out to explore elements of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in an Indian context. Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted in Chennai, India with the owner-managers of small and medium sized accountancy firms to identify the most important elements of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The respondents interviewed gave information upon their professional experiences, entrepreneurial orientations, key stakeholders and the opinions towards the knowledge intensive accounting profession. Qualitative data analysis reveals that the entrepreneurship orientation exhibited by owner-managers' of small and medium-sized accounting firms differs due to the complex interplay of several actors in an entrepreneurial ecosystem. The key elements of the entrepreneurial ecosystem include a combination of individual, societal, institutional and cultural factors relating to the themes of importance such as education and training, organisational culture, funding availability, support services and social networking and gender orientation. Government interventions, with the help of other non-government organisations, advocacy groups, universities and funding investors, are critical in developing nations in order to promote sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems and to overcome gender-based discrimination in small and medium sized accounting firms operating in India.

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.

In this study, we link the research on open innovation with issues relating to geographical proximity and regional clustering. Based on our analysis of a sample of 3,468 European firms, we find that close geographical proximity tends to increase firm-university linkages, enhance inter-firm explicit and tacit knowledge flows and lead to comparatively less reliance on internal research and development. We attribute these effects to the underlying benefits created by reduced transaction costs and increased trust and reciprocity created within regional clusters. These cluster-based effects tend to facilitate the 'connect and develop' operational philosophy of open innovation. Our findings are highly relevant to the open innovation literature, and also potentially extend an open innovation perspective to the analysis of regional clustering's effects on innovation and organizational performance.

Open innovation has generally been explored in terms of improved innovation performance vis-à-vis product/service innovation performance. However, process innovation is often ignored in the open innovation literature. In this study, we assess the impact of openness on innovation in products/services, and also on process innovation, drawing on a large-scale sample of Australian firms. In essence, we find that open innovation models are useful for firms seeking to innovate in processes as well as products and services. However, we find that openness to external information sources may, after a time, lead to decreasing marginal returns as measured by innovation performance. We also observe that, within our sample, the proposed complementarities between internal and external knowledge are generally only evident as precursors to the introduction of new products and services, and may not be as beneficial in stimulating process innovations. It is also shown by our study that investment in absorptive capacity has a declining marginal effect on the innovation performance of new processes, but not on the introduction of new products and services.