Antecedents Of Innovativeness In Technology-Based Services (Tbs): Peering Into The Black Box Of Entrepreneurial Orientation

Innovativeness is the organization's capability for developing and introducing innovations. We argue that new combinations and recombinations of prior and new knowledge (by way of creating, assembling, and transforming knowledge) result in innovativeness in an organization. We further assert that a knowledge-based focus on innovativeness is particularly important for firms that are technology-based. The majority of studies focusing on innovativeness are in the entrepreneurship arena, and a large number of studies consider innovativeness as one of three dimensions of the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) construct, the other two dimensions being proactiveness and risk-taking. However, recent research has suggested peering into the black box of EO by disaggregating the EO construct and examining the interrelationships among its three components. Hence, using the knowledge-based view and drawing from multiple disciplines, our study conceptualizes innovativeness as a criterion variable and investigates the antecedent role of proactiveness and risk-taking propensity on innovativeness in the context of technology-based services (TBS). We hypothesize that both proactiveness and risk-taking propensity exhibit a curvilinear relationship with innovativeness and introduce organizational structure formality as a moderator to further explicate these relationships. Our results show that proactiveness has a curvilinear (inverted U relationship) with innovativeness, and that this relationship is attenuated by organizational structure formality. Additional analysis indicates that in TBS firms, risk-taking propensity has a positive linear relationship with innovativeness, and this relationship is accentuated by organizational structure formality. Finally, we discuss important conceptual and practical implications of our study and provide suggestions for future research.