Lida P. Kyrgidou

Drivers and Performance Outcomes of Innovativeness: An Empirical Study

The issue of innovativeness within organizations has attracted considerable attention in the literature. However, limited knowledge exists about the drivers of and their simultaneous effects on innovativeness and the role of innovativeness in enhancing performance. We adopt the resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm and insights from the literature on capabilities to investigate specific capability types serving as antecedents to innovativeness and to examine its performance outcomes. From a sample of 218 Greek manufacturers, the results indicate that managerial, entrepreneurial and technical capabilities facilitate the establishment of innovativeness, which in turn enhances business performance. The study lends support to prior research that highlights the importance of innovativeness in enhancing organizational performance and sharpens understanding of the drivers of innovativeness and the way they collectively operate through innovativeness to boost performance. The study further provides new insights into the role of innovativeness from the perspective of the RBV, while highlighting certain firm capabilities that might both enable and impede competitive advantage and superior performance creation. As such, this study contributes to the effective management of the innovativeness process within organizations.

Strategic entrepreneurship: origins, core elements and research directions

Purpose – The question of how to integrate strategic and entrepreneurial management to achieve a better balance between advantage‐ and opportunity‐seeking behaviours has received increased academic and practitioner interest in recent years. However, little consensus exists over the meaning of this concept of “strategic entrepreneurship” (SE), its constituents and its operation. This paper aims to address these issues.Design/methodology/approach – In response, the paper reports a thorough review of SEs origins and current conceptualizations to map its core components and charts critical research directions for this exciting emerging field. Analysis of the terrain of SE reveals eight core components drawn from entrepreneurship and strategic management that captures conditions necessary for its application.Findings – From this analysis, the paper offers an alternative model of SE, and charts four key research areas with accompanying research questions to inspire future research. These outcomes offer avenues...

Entrepreneurship education in higher educational institutions: the gender dimension

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address entrepreneurial programs offered by Greek higher education institutions (HEIs) to 1639 students in different scientific disciplines at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh) and Technical Educational Institution of Thessaloniki (TEITh). The programs were analyzed and it was revealed that there were differences in participation rates, attitudes towards entrepreneurship education and perceptions about required skills between the two genders.Design/methodology/approach – During the developmental phase of the particular entrepreneurship program, an evaluation stage had been predicted, whereby student participants (344 females and 370 males AUTh students and 410 females and 515 males TEITh students) would anonymously fill out questionnaires upon completion of the program, regarding male as opposed to female attitudes and perceptions.Findings – There are higher enrollment rates of males than females. Regarding attitudes towards participation in entrepreneur...

The effect of competence exploration and competence exploitation on strategic entrepreneurship

Strategic entrepreneurship captures firms’ efforts to simultaneously excel at opportunity seeking and advantage seeking. But little research exists into mechanisms that might facilitate strategic entrepreneurship. Drawing on the twin concepts of competence exploration and competence exploitation, we study their effects on strategic entrepreneurship. Theoretically, the entrepreneurial components of strategic entrepreneurship (an entrepreneurial mindset and creating innovation) should benefit from competence exploration while its strategic components (managing resources strategically and executing competitive advantages) should benefit from competence exploitation, but not vice-versa. Our findings, however, suggest that this theoretical dichotomy does not hold up in practice.

The Role of Location as a Selection Criterion in FDI: The Case of SMEs in Greece

The study examines the internationalization of Greek SMEs in Western Europe and the Balkan area, focusing on the role of location as a selection criterion in their FDI decisions. Data aimed at capturing SMEs’ perceptions with regard to incentives affecting their FDI based on location criteria. We find that location plays a significant role with regard to the benefits that firms gain, highlighting OLI paradigms theoretical relevance in the examination of FDI, while presenting internationalization trends in the global environment. Findings further contribute to the adaption of effective practices to enhance firms’ competitiveness through more rational and targeted investment decisions.

Identifying tomorrow's entrepreneurs: entrepreneurship education in Greece

The current study aims at examining the importance of characteristics that young individuals perceive as a stimulus in undertaking entrepreneurial activity in future. Two widely acknowledged tests, the attitudes toward enterprise (ATE) and the general enterprising tendency (GET) test, served as the research tools in order to draw indications regarding youths potential entrepreneurial behaviour in the Greek context. Research in a sample of undergraduate students of different backgrounds indicated that the ATE test seems to work better and ranked youths attitudes in the following order: creativity, achievement, leadership, personal control and intuition. Provided that young individuals increasingly constitute the recipients of entrepreneurial educational and policy initiatives, the current study contributes in several ways and responds to past research calls for the need to design appropriate entrepreneurial supportive processes, but also to effectively measure and evaluate the outcomes of existing entrepreneurial programmes and frameworks.