Configuring foreign market knowledge and opportunity recognition capabilities to predict the performance of export-manufacturing firms

Export-manufacturing firms survive and ultimately succeed when they can accumulate, harvest,and utilise foreign knowledge to better marshal the capabilities to recognise opportunities. Prior studies are replete with a single solution by combining foreign market knowledge (FMK) and firm performance. A shift from contingent theory to the configurational approach suggests that there are multiple solutions available to achieve intended outcomes. Based on the equifinality assumption, we configure FMK in conjunction with opportunity recognition capabilities to predict performance. In total, 382 export-manufacturing firms were investigated by employing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and necessity analysis of QCA (NCA). Salient findings suggest that young firms achieve superior performance from foreign business and institutional knowledge by enhancing opportunity exploration capability, whereas mature firms succeed from internationalisation knowledge and nurturing opportunity exploitation capability. The study is one of which that contributes to the methodology by introducing fsQCA and NCA in the knowledge management literature.