Technological uncertainty, market orientation and firms’ economic performance

The paper analyzes how a technological environment affects the relationship between market orientation and a firm’s economic performance. In particular, the study focuses on a dimension of technological environment that has been neglected by the extant literature to date, i.e., the level of uncertainty for firms created by the homogeneity-heterogeneity of the set of technologies available in an industry. In addition, in contrast to past studies that have been primarily based on cross-sectional analysis and subjective measures, this paper proposes a longitudinal study based on objective measures of market orientation, technological uncertainty and performance. This paper’s contributions are twofold. First, our findings show the peculiar effect of technological uncertainty on the market orientation – the firm’s performance link. Second, this paper provides a set of methodologies, particularly on the measurement of market orientation and of technological uncertainty, that can be useful for future studies on related topics.