Editorial

Entrepreneurship and service innovation

Nelson Oly Ndubisi
Helsinki Business School, Espoo, Finland

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a special issue on entrepreneurship and service innovation, and to conceptualize the link
between entrepreneurial orientation, innovation and entrepreneurship or new entry.
Design/methodology/approach – Analysis of secondary data.
Findings – Entrepreneurial orientation (EO), innovation (IN) and entrepreneurship are in a vital “triadic connect”, where EO supports innovation
in organizations and innovation promotes new entry or new venture creation – a vehicle for commercialization of innovations.
Research limitations/implications – There is a need for empirical validation of the linkages proposed in this conceptual paper.
Practical implications – This “triadic connect” between EO, IN and entrepreneurship or new entry is a source of or key driver of organizational
performance (OP) and competitive advantage (CA).
Originality/value – The theorization and schematization of the “triadic connect” (i.e. EO–IN–NE link) and outcomes (namely, OP and CA) is
presented.
Keywords Organizational performance, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, competitive advantage, Entrepreneurial orientation, Triadic connect
Paper type Editorial

Introduction to the special issue and Dess, 1996) or an organizational culture of enhancing
wealth through innovation and exploitation of opportunities
Business marketing reflects a broader concept that includes
(Nasution et al., 2011) – have important implications for
emergence and greater attention given to services (Malhotra
innovation. EO supports innovation in organizations, and
et al., 2008; Ndubisi, 2013). Service “as the application of
innovation promotes new entry or new venture creation – a
specialized competences (knowledge and skills) through
vehicle for commercialization of innovations (Figure 1).
deeds, processes, and performances for the benefit of another
EO, IN and entrepreneurship are in a vital “triadic
entity or the entity itself” (Vargo and Lusch, 2004, p. 2)
connect”, which plausibly explains why they are often seen as
contributes significantly to the growth of every economic
“hand-in-glove”. This “triadic connect” between EO, IN and
system. In today’s increasingly dynamic, complex and
entrepreneurship or NE is a source of or key driver of OP and
unpredictable business environment, service organizations/
competitive advantage (CA) (Figure 2).
industries, value-added service providers and non-tangible
In their strategy typology, Miles and Snows (1978)
goods providers (Malhotra et al., 2008; Ndubisi, 2012; Vargo
considered entrepreneurship as a key dimension. Based on the
and Lusch, 2004) try to renew themselves and add value
degree of product–market innovation, they classified firms
through entrepreneurial activities and innovation. Innovation
into prospectors, analyzers and reactors, and argued that all
is the adoption of an idea or behavior new to the adopting
three firm types must deal with the entrepreneurial problem
organization, which involves all dimensions of organizational
effectively to be successful. Prospectors seek to identify and
activities, such as a new product or service, a new production
exploit new opportunities through both product (including
process technology, a new structure or administrative system
service) and market development (Miles and Snows, 1978),
and a new plan or program within the organization
and Defenders try to create a stable domain by protecting their
(Damanpour, 1991).
product–market innovation and thrive through stability,
Entrepreneurship or new entry (NE), and entrepreneurial
reliability and efficiency (Slater and Narver, 1995). Analyzers,
orientation (EO) – the processes, practices and
on the other hand, flourish through more purposeful product–
decision-making activities that lead to new entry (Lumpkin
market innovation than defenders, but use a more cautious
and selective approach than Prospectors (Hambrick, 2003).
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at Entrepreneurship and innovation are concepts often linked
www.emeraldinsight.com/0885-8624.htm with improved firm performance and regarded as primary
sources of competitive advantage. Zahra (1991) and Wiklund
(1999) argued that firms demonstrating more entrepreneurial
strategic orientation perform better, whereas Prajogo and
Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing Ahmed (2006) claimed that right from the genesis of the
29/6 (2014) 449 –453
© Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 0885-8624]
industrial revolution, innovation has been a key source of
[DOI 10.1108/JBIM-07-2013-0148] competitive advantage. The link between entrepreneurship

449
 Editorial
Nelson Oly Ndubisi
Figure 1 The link between EO, innovation and entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurial Innovation
Orientation
(EO)
Figure 2 The schema of the triadic connect (EO–IN–NE) and
outcomes (OP/CA)
NE
OP/CA
EO IN
and innovation suggests that entrepreneurship when matched
with market-oriented culture contributes significantly to
successful innovation (Slater, 1997). More recently, there is a
growing belief among the service-dominant logic and
servitization of the manufacturing sector schools that many of
the effects/contributions to firm performance and competitive
edge are creditable to service innovation, leading to greater
attention being paid to the concept of service innovation
(Ndubisi and Iftikhar, 2012). Yet, despite the rapid growth of
the service sector and increasing servitization of the
manufacturing sector, past investigations of the role of
entrepreneurship and innovation in organizations have mostly
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Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing
Volume 29 · Number 6 · 2014 · 449 –453
Entrepreneurship
(New Entry)
centered on manufacturing firms or physical products, with
little attention to services. As such, this special edition aims to
bring together, cutting-edge research of international
standards on how (service) organizations add value, increase
performance and create competitive advantage through
entrepreneurship and/or innovation.
The special issue follows the tradition of JBIM of helping to
overcome shortages in business-to-business marketing theory
and research (Sheth and Sharma, 2006), and its foci on
business-to-business marketing and sales.
Business-to-business marketing and sales refer to one
company marketing and selling its products and services to
another organization such as a commercial enterprise,
government or not-for-profit organization. In 2012, a call was
made for articles which offer new insights into
entrepreneurship and service innovation in
business-to-business context which may be in the form of
conceptual, case-based or empirical papers that consider (but
not limited to) the following topics of interest:
● entrepreneurship, EO and firm performance;
● service innovation and value creation;
● measurement of IN;
● entrepreneurial marketing for services;
● IN in services management;
● IN characteristics and diffusion of services;
● service organizations and CA;
● corporate entrepreneurship, IN and performance;
● IN in healthcare marketing;
● IN in sports marketing and sponsorship;
● IN in higher education marketing;
● outsourcing, offshoring and franchising;
● service dominant logic and value co-creation, servitization,
resources, capabilities and performance of service firms;
● service quality, service failure and service recovery, IN in
not-for-profit organizations;
● environmental marketing IN; and
● mindfulness, and service quality and reliability.
 Editorial
Nelson Oly Ndubisi
The overwhelming response from scholars and practitioners
in the overarching fields of entrepreneurship and service IN, in
the form of quality submissions, testifies to the timeliness of
the subjects of this special issue.
This issue is the result of a rigorous process of selection
from many quality submissions from scholars interested in the
subject of entrepreneurship and service innovation in
for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. We would like to
congratulate all the authors who have contributed to the
special issue and also thank all the reviewers for their hard
work and for meticulously reading and appraising the
submissions and resubmissions. In the following sections, we
present a summary of each of the six articles (four focusing on
for-profit organizations and two not-for-profit organizations)
accepted for the special issue after a rigorous blind review
process.
Following this introductory article is the article by Nelson
Oly Ndubisi and James Agarwal which analyzed the direct and
indirect effects of IN and entrepreneurial orientation on
service performance of small and medium enterprises in a
developing Asian economy. The authors draw from the
strategic management literature in theorizing and modeling
the relationships, which were tested in small information
technology (IT) firms. Findings indicate a significant direct
and indirect positive relationship between EO dimensions and
three types of innovation and quality performance. Innovation
mediates in the relationship of EO with quality performance.
The article adds to extant strategic management literature,
resource-based view and dynamic capabilities theories, as well
as contributes to managerial practice by underscoring the need
for owner-managers of small enterprises to pursue
EO-focused and innovation enhancement strategies in an
integrated manner. Furthermore, the combination of a
developing country context and the significance of IT enhance
the contextual contribution of the paper.
The next article by Rajan Nataraajan and Madhukar Angur
investigated the impact of aspects of knowledge economy
covered by the knowledge economy index (KEI) and aspects
of entrepreneurial activity covered by the global
entrepreneurship index (GEI) on quality of life (QOL) in a
country. The authors gathered KEI, GEI and QOL data for
different countries and analyzed them using correlation and
regression analyses. The results of the analysis yielded two key
findings: first, KEI and GEI have a significant effect on QOL.
Second, the innovation index (a component of KEI) and the
total early-stage entrepreneurship (a component of GEI)
emerge as key factors that improve QOL. The authors argue
that by improving the innovative abilities of a nation’s
population and fostering the early-stage entrepreneurial
activity, the quality of life in a country could be enhanced.
Mark Freel, Paul Robson and Sarah Jack, in their article on
“Risk capital constraints to innovation in services”, tried to
furnish a better understanding of the factors associated with
perceptions of venture capital as a barrier to innovation in an
important subset of knowledge-intensive service firms –
technology-based business services. Data for the study were
collected through a survey of 264 technology-based service
firms located in Scotland and Northern England, and
analyzed using bivariate and multivariate statistical
techniques. They found that smaller, faster growing and
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Volume 29 · Number 6 · 2014 · 449 –453
R&D-intensive firms perceive greater equity barriers.
Moreover, firms that are relatively happy about the managerial
competencies available to them, but who identify deficiencies
in marketing skills, and the availability of external debt finance
is shown to be “needy”. The study contributes to the
improvement of sparse extant literature in the fields of venture
capital demand and innovative service firms.
In the forth article, Yew Chong Tan and Nelson Oly
Ndubisi evaluated the relationship between organizational
resources, technological innovation, relationship quality (RQ)
and performance, as well as the mediating effect of firm–
supplier relationship quality. A survey was conducted of the
palm oil processing sector in Malaysia, consisting milling,
refining and oleo-chemical companies. Data were gathered
and used to statistically test hypotheses that underpinned a
proposed conceptual model. Findings are that organizational
resources have a direct impact on RQ, which, in turn, has a
direct effect on performance indicators such as financial
performance, market effectiveness and strategic objectives.
RQ is a mediator in some of the resource–performance
relationships, which underpins the genesis of the research
undertaken. The mediating role played by RQ in promoting
business performance in the palm oil processing sectors is
achieved through translating the effects of organizational
resources into improved business performance. The results
offer some suggestions to top management, e.g. on the type of
resources to invest in and exploring vital relational issues that
enhance performance outcomes and the impact of different
sets of resources on relational dynamics.
In the next article, Hung-Tai Tsou, Ja-Shen Chen and
Wen-Hsuan Liao examined the role of market and technology
orientations and innovative competence in service delivery
innovation. Based on analyses of data collected through a field
study of IT firms in Taiwan, the authors found that proactive
market orientation and technology orientation affect
exploratory and exploitative innovative competence, and
exploitative innovative competence affects service delivery
innovation. By integrating innovative competence as a
mediator in the relationship of market and technology
orientations with service delivery innovation, the authors show
how the benefits of market and technology orientations
translate into competencies that enhance IT services delivery.
Some organizations have benefited significantly from
technological innovations as a result of their productivity
orientation, and others have failed to fully benefit from their
investments in new innovations due to under-utilization of
such innovations (Ndubisi, 2005). Although some past studies
(Landauer, 1995; Ndubisi and Jantan, 2003; Sichel, 1997)
have linked under-utilization of innovations to the
productivity paradox, the outcome of these studies is
inconclusive. Addressing this gap, Namwoon Kim and Jae H.
Pae in the next article explored how intra-firm diffusion of
innovation leads to inter-firm relationship benefits for both
providers and adopters of innovation. The study focuses on
understanding the causes and the effects associated with
successful diffusion and utilization of innovation within a firm.
Using data from business-to-business markets, the study
found that adopters and the providers of innovation benefit
when both proactively participate in the intra-firm diffusion
process. They explained that benefits are created for the
 Editorial
Nelson Oly Ndubisi
adopter via improvement in efficiency, and for the provider
through establishment of a long-term relationship with the
adopting organization and by creating high switching costs.
The penultimate and concluding articles take the discussion
to the not-for-profit context, and demonstrate that
technology, innovation and entrepreneurship are not only
relevant for the success of for-profit organizations but also for
not-for-profit ones. Rania Hussein and Maha Mourad, in the
fifth article, examined the factors that affect adoption of
technological innovations in the higher education industry –
specifically, the use of web-based technology
(WEBCT/blackboard) by faculty and administrators in
universities in Egypt. Based on the analysis of data supplied by
200 faculty and administrators, they found that, in addition to
the attributes of the innovation, university-based factors as
well as service provider factors were significant factors
influencing adoption of technological innovations in the
higher education industry.
The concluding article by Vik Naidoo and Terry Wu
considered the role of innovation in marketing and
internationalization of higher education. Using an inductive
constructivist qualitative methodology grounded in 12 case
studies of internationalization in not-for-profit education
sector, the study applied Dunning’s eclectic framework as
its theoretical anchor. The study revealed that entry mode
choice in the not-for-profit context may not always be
reconciled with extant literature derived mostly from a
for-profit context. The broader definition of offshore equity
investment is in sharp contrast to previous entry mode
research which is largely, if not exclusively, grounded in a
for-profit context. The findings suggest that entry decisions
in the case of universities do not always conform to previous
entry mode research grounded in the international
marketing/business literature.
I would like to conclude this introductory article with a
special note of thanks to all the paper reviewers for their
high-quality service and professionalism without which this
special issue may not have materialized, and to the Chief
Editor of JBIM, Professor Wes Johnston, for commissioning
the special issue and for his support throughout the process. I
would like to recognize the following reviewers and staff for a
job well done:
● James Agarwal, University of Calgary, Canada.
● Celine Capel, Noah’s Ark, Kings Christian College and
University of Southern Queensland, Australia.
● Mark Freel, University of Ottawa, Canada.
● Margaret Matanda, Monash University, Australia.
● Vik Naidoo, Curtin University, Australia.
● Rajan nataraajan, auburn university, USA
● Gibson Ndubisi, Anambra State University, Uli,
Nigeria.
● Saara Pekkarinen, University of Oulu, Finland.
● Hanna Salojärvi, Lappeenranta University of
Technology, Finland.
● Bengü Sevil, Izmır University of Economics, Turkey.
● Ramanjeet Singh, Institute of Management and
Technology, UK.
● Francois Therin, Curtin University, Malaysia.
● Can Uslay, Rutgers University, NJ, USA.
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● Terry Wu, University of Ontario Institute of
Technology, Canada.
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Nelson Oly Ndubisi Volume 29 · Number 6 · 2014 · 449 –453

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Corresponding author
Vargo, S.L. and Lusch, R.F. (2004), “Evolving to a new
dominant logic for marketing”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 68 Nelson Oly Ndubisi can be contacted at: olynel@
No. January, pp. 1-17. hotmail.com

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