Abstract

     Since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, various options have been created to export products, with the creation and development of startups becoming a viable and significant option. Previous research has described the influence of competitive business advantage on international performance. However, the novelty of the current research was to evaluate the influence of the company’s capabilities, through the competitive advantage of the company as a mediator in international performance. The study was based on the responses of 200 active startups in Peru. The PLS-SEM technique was utilized with the company’s capabilities linked to internationalization processes as independent variables, as well as market intelligence, product innovation, and pricing. The mediating variable was competitive advantage, and the dependent variable was international performance. It was found that all three capabilities influenced competitive advantage and, ultimately, international performance. It was concluded that competitive advantage does not act as a mediator between pricing capabilities and the international performance of startups. Moreover, it was determined that competitive advantage acts as a mediator between two of the three assessed capabilities: market intelligence capabilities and product innovation capabilities. The results were supported by the reflective and formative evaluation of the results obtained through the applied technique. These results could help create better programs to promote startups interested in internationalizing and exporting products.

Introduction

     In the last 30 years, the resource-based theory (RBT) [1] has been shown as one of the most relevant for the description, explanation and prediction organization. It should be noted that RBT only took shape in the 1990s, because in the 1980s, theories were focused on the outside of organizations, such as Porter’s forces. In the first decade of the new century, the application of RBT could be supported in different disciplines. Today, RBT can be recognized as an influential approach in strategic management. The framework of RBT is composed of four elements: (a) value, (b) being rare, (c) immobility, and (d) sustainability. These are the characteristics that a company needs to have for the strategic planning reference and hold a sustained competitive advantage. The four conditions of RBT suggest that poor organizational policies, processes and procedures can weaken a resource’s potential competitive advantage.

     There is also the concept of dynamic capabilities (DC), which can be considered an extension of the resource-based view (RBV) because of its ability to respond to rapid technological changes. Although this concept was born at the end of the 1950s, it was through the publication of Teece, Pisano and Shuen [2] in 1997 that it gained prominence in strategic management. DC is defined as “the firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences to address rapidly changing environments” [2]. First of all, dynamic capabilities can be conceptualized as those meta-capabilities that give companies the ability to adapt to new changes and that at the same time can be specific to the company, i.e., very difficult to imitate. There are six functions that can be performed by DCs to enter a new market or position themselves more strongly in a market already won: renew, recombine, redeploy, replicate, retrench, and retire the resources/capabilities. With this, it can be identified that it is not only a matter of creating resources, but also of eliminating those that do not contribute to the creation of competitive advantage. There is no consensus on when to use DC, since on the one hand, it can be argued that it works well in a scenario of rapid changes, especially technological ones, but it can also be argued that in non-repetitive changes, its use is not advisable because it could be reconfiguring the company’s resources for a very short period, and its benefit could be minimal. The organization who possesses DCs can meet the change that is necessary to build a competitive advantage. Both RBT and CD contain elements that are crucial to a company’s competitive advantage. On the one hand, the value of the processes, products and services that an organization must have must be identified, understood and measured, so that it can be known why the company’s capabilities are valuable. Rarity is also identified, i.e., these capabilities are unique in the marketplace; it is also expected that they cannot be copied by competitors. Dynamic capabilities need the company’s continuous work to make them evolve to ensure that they remain rare and inimitable, achieving such a positioning that they are not substitutable.

Results

     As previously mentioned, we performed PLS-SEM to examine our hypotheses, for this, a bootstrapping was used of 5000 subsamples, this technique was performed used to estimate summary statistics, such as the mean or standard deviations, considering that it is the most approved setting for PLS-SEM [137]. As seen in Table 5, the capabilities of product innovation, marketing intelligence, and price are firmly related to the variable of competitive advantage; in other words, hypotheses H1, H2, and H3 are supported. Additionally, Table 5 shows that competitive advantage is also firmly connected to the international performance of startups; as a result, hypothesis H4 is also supported. The variance inflation factor (VIF), which was also examined to identify if our result has multicollinearity problems, demonstrates that it is not a problem between the exogenous latent constructs. Every VIF value that is not a problem is between 1 and 2, below 5. In the case of the R square values in Table 5, our model explained 29.2% of the competitive advantage variance and 16.2% of the international performance of the startups, which means that this model fits our data very well because the predictive relevance confirms the rule of thumb that says it must not be negative [137].