Understanding entrepreneurial vision for growth, innovation and performance in Kenya’s leather industry

Abstract

While entrepreneurial orientation’s role in determining performance of businesses has been empirically established, studies from Africa or an industry-ecosystem perspective have been scarce. Furthermore, the significance of an entrepreneur’s vision is often acknowledged but little studied in relation to entrepreneurial outcomes. This study explored vision for growth as an individual entrepreneurial disposition and its relationship with innovation and performance outcomes among industry actors. The study collected self-reported quantitative data from a mixed sampling of value-system actors as representatives of the Kenyan leather industry. SPSS v.21 was used for descriptive statistics and SMART-PLS3 for exploratory and inferential analysis. Vision for growth was shown to determine both innovation and performance while innovation did not mediate the vision for growth and performance link as hypothesized. This study contributes to a further understanding of psychological perspectives of entrepreneurship, especially the vision for growth construct, and its significance to firms in an industry ecosystem. Recommendations are made for further research, training, policy, and practice interventions aimed at enhancing entrepreneurial vision and innovation from an industry-ecosystem perspective for realization of economic benefits in the wake of globalized competition.

Entrepreneurs' competency, marketing innovation, and enterprise growth: uncovering the mediating role of marketing innovation

“…As shown in Table 5, zero is within the lower and upper bounds that indicate marketing innovation does not significantly mediate the relationship between entrepreneurs' competency and MSME growth. This result is consistent with the finding reported by Kamuri [17]. Thus, marketing innovation is not playing a mediating role that leaves competency as the sole direct influencer of enterprise growth.…”

“…For example, Jung and Shegai [16] found that marketing innovation has a direct and indirect effect on firm performance. Regarding the mediating effect of innovation, Kamuri [17] claimed that innovation does not mediate the association between competency and enterprise performance. Taleb et al [18] also conducted a study and found that entrepreneurial resources can significantly affect innovation capability.…”

What do We Know about Vision? A Sustainability Lens

“…From the coding process, four themes concerning vision attributes, vision content, vision communication and sustainability performance emerged. The attributes of effective vision statements are brevity, clarity, future orientation, stability, challenges, abstractness and an ability to inspire, which have been widely endorsed by scholars as effective vision attributes, e.g., [125][126][127][128][129][130][131][132][133][134][135]. In terms of vision content, there are several content imageries supporting this theme, including those related to motive, venture growth, sales, leadership and stakeholder satisfaction imageries.…”