Entrepreneurial Adaptation in Emerging Markets: Strategic Entrepreneurial Choices, Adaptive Capabilities and Firm Performance

Sustaining entrepreneurship in resource-constrained and institutionally weak emerging markets (EMs) poses theoretical and practical challenges. We address some of these challenges by adopting a middle-range theoretical approach and proposing the concept of ‘entrepreneurial adaptation’ (EA). Complementing the concept of entrepreneurial mindset and subsuming those of strategic orientation and adaptive capabilities, we posit that EA consists of a set of cognitively derived, action-oriented strategic entrepreneurial choices that foster certain dimensions of adaptive capabilities which in turn sustain entrepreneurship in EMs. We empirically test our hypotheses on a proprietary survey-based dataset of 219 Indian firms and contribute to the extant literature by proposing a model of EA, besides suggesting an alternative bridge to the two disciplines of entrepreneurship and strategy.