Exploring the characteristics of the market-driven firms and antecedents to sustained competitive advantage

During the last few decades, identifying and examining the characteristics of market-driven firms have been a dominant theme in strategic marketing research. It has been argued that market-driven firms are superior in their market sensing and customer linking capabilities, enabling market-driven firms to outperform their competitors. This paper reports the findings of a study that examines the role market-focused learning capability and marketing capability in innovation-based competitive strategy on sustainable competitive advantage. The findings indicate that entrepreneurship is an important factor in sustained competitive advantage (SCA) and while market-focused learning capability leads to higher degrees of innovation, marketing capability enables SCA. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Organisational innovation: A Proposal for measurement

In spite of the prominence assigned to innovation in the strategic marketing literature particularly in the area of competitive strategy there have been several inadequacies in the conceptualization and measurement of the innovation construct. Responding to the need for a comprehensive measure, this paper attempts to develop and validate a measure for organisational innovation. Addressing the need to capture both the degree and type of innovation, as well as the synergistic influence of innovation types on performance outcomes, this paper proposes operationalising organisational innovation as a multidimensional construct. The proposed measure has a complex higher order structure that captures the variance in its dimensions that are different forms manifested by the construct. The measure also captures the synergistic impact of different innovation types on competitive advantage. The implications for theory, limitations and directions for future research are presented.

Positioning terrorism in management and marketing: Research propositions

Terrorism poses both direct and indirect threats to the operations of the firm. It represents a market imperfection that increases transaction costs and creates barriers to the free flow of goods, affecting potential gains that would occur in the presence of unhindered exchange. Terrorism reflects the risk or actual encounter of violent acts, whose goal is to engender fear, coercion, or intimidation. We investigate terrorism and its association with marketing strategy and operations. Key concepts on terrorism are reviewed and a collection of propositions is offered. We highlight the pivotal roles of sourcing, production, distribution, pricing, communications, and general business strategy as functions influenced by, or capable of influencing, terrorism. Lastly, we offer managerial implications, as well as directions and guidelines for future research.