BUS602: Marketing Management

Although there is a lot of evidence that entrepreneurial and market orientation impacts firm performance, there is little understanding of how these capabilities are deployed to obtain competitive advantage. This research adds to the literature on entrepreneurial marketing by drawing from the resource based and the dynamic capability theory.

This research offers new insights that Entrepreneurial Orientation impacts firm performance through Market Orientation and MC. The second contribution of this study is that it explains the mediating role of marketing capabilities between MO and firm performance. The study provides new empirical support to the dynamic capability theory explaining the impact of entrepreneurial orientation in developing market knowledge development and marketing deployment capabilities.

The NTBFs in technology parks are an important source of knowledge transfer from researchers and universities and lead to new business opportunities. The new technology based firms (NTBFs) face numerous challenges as they move from their early start up to sustainability and growth stages. These firms operate in competitive environments facing uncertainties, risks, and competition while having limited resources. The markets often keep on shifting and are generally fragmented as the NTBFs try to find customers, and position themselves. One possible challenge is the lack of proper marketing capabilities as the firms are more focussed on technology and only use marketing as a tactical tool to market their products. The market and technological turbulence is so severe that technological competency alone is not sufficient to achieve success. These firms must integrate their technological competencies with marketing capabilities to understand customer needs to identify and pursue entrepreneurial opportunities.

In this continuously changing and dynamic scenario, successful NTBFs use marketing in a creative way to understand their customers, market, and technology to differentiate their products. These firms are poised toward the long term and have an obsession for opportunity recognition, value creation, and exploitation of the customer need, which makes the functions of entrepreneurship and marketing critical permeating throughout the firm. Morris et al. define entrepreneurial marketing as "the proactive identification and exploitation of opportunities for acquiring and retaining profitable customers through innovative approaches to risk management, resource leveraging and value creation". This description helps to integrate the key marketing and entrepreneurship concepts.

Marketing researchers have been mostly focusing the large corporations and resource plenty firms and have paid less attention to the resource crunched new entrepreneurial firms. This narrow perspective has led to the lack of research on how the entrepreneur carries out marketing in innovative, resource parsimonious way with relatively lesser developed skills and capabilities. Research on the relationship between entrepreneurship and marketing is fragmented and there is no comprehensive theory developed as yet. Even though entrepreneurial marketing is a fragmented research area, it is necessary to develop tools, principles, and theories in order to assist new companies, especially technology based start-ups and innovative new small firms to survive and operate in turbulent and changeable environments.

There is also a lack of research regarding the effectiveness of science and technology parks in nurturing NTBFs particularly in developing countries, therefore, this study aims to fill the gap by conducting research in one of the more established techno parks in Turkey - the METU Technopark. Previous research shows that small and medium sized companies in Turkey have generally not come up to the expectations of creating knowledge-based, innovative, and internationally competitive NTBFs. This fact underlines the need for studying the capabilities of NTBFs in Turkey in order to assess any in-competencies and problems according to which appropriate strategies and policies can be suggested to enable these firms to be able to compete in the competitive and turbulent global environment.

In order to address our question of how various firm capabilities shape NTBFs' performance we study the impact of marketing and entrepreneurial capabilities on the performance of these entrepreneurial firms.