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Entrepreneurial orientation and market orientation (EO and MO, respectively) have received extensive research attention in the past several decades. Although scholars widely agree that both MO and EO are critical to firms' performances, a better understanding is still needed about how market and entrepreneurial orientation develop over time as well as their relative impact on the growth of the SME's performance. This study does not consider MO and EO as generic resources that always positively influence firms' performances; instead, it tries to explore contingent elements, such as social and business networks and accumulated entrepreneurial experience. The hypotheses were tested on 191 small and medium-sized electronic firms located in an Italian geographical cluster during two periods: 2005 and 2016. This study suggests that SMEs, which develop social networks, may enjoy considerable advantages from entrepreneurial and market orientation, improving their performance benefits. Moreover, our results show that previous entrepreneurial experience, when specific, can reinforce the impact of entrepreneurial and market orientation on firms' performance growth. This analysis makes several important contributions to the management literature on the strategic orientation of firms, the entrepreneurial experience and network development.

This paper intends to verify the impact of geographical proximity on the processes of knowledge acquisition and exploitation by high-tech start-ups considering at the same time the role of both the social and cognitive dimensions of proximity. Our basic assumption is that proximity means a lot more than just geography. The findings from this research broaden our understanding of how start-ups located inside an industrial cluster acquire knowledge from their customers and exploit it in an innovative way, underscoring the need to reconsider assumptions regarding the importance of geographical proximity between business partners during knowledge management.

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