Sailing through the storms towards Treasure Island: The relationships between strategies, obstacles and firm performance

Companies devise strategies to successfully navigate the treacherous waters of an uncertain business environment. They need to tackle regulatory or market obstacles in order to succeed and eventually achieve strong growth performance. This study aims to better understand the complex relationship between strategies, obstacles and firm performance. It uses regression techniques on a cross-national homogeneous sample of 37,150 European companies based in 14 Member States in order to study the correlation between: i) firms’ perceptions about the importance of their strategies and the obstacles they face, and ii) firms’ innovation and economic performance. The findings point out that the firms pursuing cost reduction strategies and perceiving the lack of demand and of adequate finance as important obstacles experience poor performance. By contrast, those pursuing adaptability strategies and perceiving the lack of qualified personnel as an important obstacle grow faster, and those with explicit product innovation strategies innovate more. Moreover, the results indicate specific needs of high-growth enterprises that, in comparison with other firms, appear less sensitive about financial constraints, more interested in the availability of skilled labour and benefiting more from cooperative strategies.