Innovation as Determinants of Export Performance

One of the most popular topics in the internationalbusiness field involves business dynamics and strategy. Within this theme, the subtopic of exporting stands out (Griffith, Cavusgil, and Xu 2008). Although the exporting literature has been described as being of interest for researchers, managers, and public policy makers, there are several important issues that have received scant attention in the field (Diaman-topoulos and Kakkos 2007). Some literature has given considerable attention to elements of product strategy because of its central role as an export performance driver. However, often such research has been under-taken without a strong theoretical platform (Morgan, Kaleka, and Katsikeas 2004). More recently, international marketing and export per-formance researchers have been encouraged to be theo-retically driven (Douglas and Craig 2006; Lages and Lages 2004; Styles, Patterson, and Ahmed 2008). Although a range of theoretical perspectives has been used, including most recently the real-options perspec-tive (Lee et al. 2009), the three theoretical paradigms used most often are the structure–conduct–performance framework from industrial organization (e.g., Cavusgil and Zou 1994), the relational or behavioral perspective (e.g., Styles, Patterson, and Ahmed 2008), and the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm (e.g., Morgan, Kaleka, and Katsikeas 2004). In this article, through the theoretical lens of the firm’s RBV, we present three major contributions to th