The Impact of Strategic Orientations on the Born Globals’ Export Performance: An Ambidexterity Approach

Abstract According to international entrepreneurship scholars, the success of Born Globals (BGs) depends on their capacity to develop an organizational ambidexterity perspective, i.e. a dual function of simultaneous knowledge exploration and exploitation. In this respect, it has been pointed out that ambidexterity can be associated with the ability to balance the development of different strategic orientations (SOs), namely, entrepreneurial orientation (EO), market orientation (MO), and learning orientation (LO). While several authors have investigated the impact of MO, EO and LO on BGs’ performance, the results of such research are often inconsistent. Based on the resource orchestration view, we assume that the combined – rather than the single – contribution of resources and capabilities provided by EO, MO, and LO, ultimately result in a superior export performance. Such an indicator is typically adopted to evaluate international performance, especially for micro and small companies. More specifically, the study aims to verify the significance of dyadic (namely, MO*EO, EO*LO, and MO*LO) and triadic (MO*EO* LO) interactions of the SO typologies on BGs’ export performance. Moreover, the paper aspires to verify if some of these interactions are more relevant than others. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 100 Italian hi-tech BGs located inside a technological cluster near Rome through a longitudinal analysis. Our findings show that all the investigated interactions positively and significantly impact on the BGs’ export performances, independently of the adopted measurement variable. However, a certain type of hierarchy emerges among the different impacts of the investigated interactions among the three SO typologies.