Radical and incremental entrepreneurial orientation: The effect of knowledge acquisition

Abstract

AbstractA firm's collaborative context can represent an important source of knowledge for sustaining its entrepreneurial outcomes. Drawing on entrepreneurship and resource-based view literature, we study how the acquisition of knowledge from inter-firm ties affects the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and performance, distinguishing between two types of knowledge, market and technological, and between two types of entrepreneurial orientation, radical and incremental. The results of the study on a sample of 203 Spanish small businesses from the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector suggest that knowledge acquisition plays different roles, depending on the type of entrepreneurial orientation developed and also on the type of knowledge exchanged. In particular, market and technological knowledge acquisition positively moderate only the relationship between radical entrepreneurial orientation and performance, while in the case of incremental entrepreneurial orientation we find only a direct positive influence of market knowledge acquisition on performance.