Entrepreneurial Marketing and New Venture Performance: The Mediating Effects of Ambidextrous Innovation

Abstract

Entrepreneurial Marketing has a significant effect on new ventures’ performance. However, the findings have been mixed and conflicting. There is still little in-depth exploration of its specific working mechanism based on two distinct literatures streams from ambidextrous innovation and entrepreneurial marketing. We present an integrated framework for analyzing entrepreneurial marketing, ambidextrous innovation and new venture performance (NVP). By conducting an empirical study on a sample of 883 new ventures (NVs) in Anhui province in China, the study found that: (a) EM is an important driver of NVP and only five dimensions of EM have positively effects on NVP ,including proactiveness, opportunity-focus, innovations, risk-taking and resource leveraging. (b) Both exploration innovation and exploitation innovation advance NVP. (c) The ambidextrous innovation did not affect NVP significantly. (d) Exploration innovation and exploitation innovation partly mediate the relationship between EM and NVP.