Organizational Learning for Innovation Performance of Ventures: The Mediating Role of Entrepreneurial Orientation

While organizational learning (OL) is vital for ventures to build knowledge bases necessary for successful innovation, less attention has been paid to how learning organizations leverage it for performance improvement. We investigate entrepreneurial orientation's (EO) role in performance-by-learning mechanisms underpinning ventures' innovative initiatives, adopting dyadic performance indicators: technological competitiveness and business performance. Analyzing 218 Korean ventures, our study shows that firms valuing OL, characterized by acquisitive and experimental learning, exhibit high EO, facilitating productive use of knowledge-based resources and enhancing performance. Importantly, EO fully mediates the performance implications of OL. Our findings suggest that a comprehensive learning approach for knowledge acquisition and experimentation provides ventures, often facing smallness and newness liabilities, with a fertile entrepreneurial ground for increased innovation returns.