Effects of entrepreneurial marketing on new ventures' exploitative and exploratory innovation: The moderating role of competitive intensity and firm size

EM is a strategic orientation that draws on seven elements: proactiveness, opportunity-focus, risk-taking orientation, innovation orientation, customer satisfaction orientation, value creation and resource leveraging. These elements reinforce each other in a synergistic manner. We investigate how EM affects a new venture's exploitative and exploratory innovation activities. To identify conditions under which EM is more or less effective, we analyze the relationship between EM and exploitative and exploratory innovation under conditions of high and low environmental competitiveness and high and low levels of firm size. Based on survey data from 146 German new ventures up to ten years old in the B2B sector, our results provide evidence of a significant and positive effect of EM on exploitative and exploratory innovation. We find, further, that under conditions of high competitive intensity, the effects of EM on exploratory innovation strengthen, while low levels of competitive intensity do not affect the relationship between EM and exploratory innovation. Our results also show that for larger firms, the positive effects of EM on exploitative innovation are weaker, while for smaller firms, those effects are stronger.