Risk-taking for entrepreneurial new entry: risk-taking dimensions and contingencies

Ambiguity remains in the literature regarding risk-taking conceptualisation and its association with the firm performance of new product entry. We unpack risk-taking into two dimensions: sensing risk-taking that manifests in a firm’s activities to identify and/or create new opportunities and seizing risk-taking that reflects activities of development and commercialisation to address identified opportunities. We argue that the two dimensions are conceptually distinct but interrelated. Using multi-sourced survey data for 186 Chinese manufacturing firms, we find that a focal firm’s new product success benefits most from adopting a concurrently high level of sensing risk-taking and seizing risk-taking when market growth is high but a high level of sensing risk-taking with a low level of seizing risk-taking when market growth is low.