Bold Moves Beat Bright Ideas in Rural Product Innovation

Entrepreneurial spirit has long been treated as the secret ingredient behind successful new products, but a sweeping new study from Vietnam suggests that the recipe is far more subtle than conventional wisdom assumes. Researchers surveying 480 enterprises in Vietnam’s One Commune One Product, or OCOP, program have found that being proactive and willing to take risks directly improves new product development performance, while sheer innovativeness, the trait most often celebrated in entrepreneurship literature, does nothing on its own. Instead, creative disposition pays off only when it is channeled through business model innovation and technology capability, two organizational mechanisms that convert entrepreneurial intent into tangible market results. The findings, published in Discover Global Society, offer one of the most detailed portraits yet of how small rural firms in an emerging economy actually innovate.

The OCOP program, inspired by Japan’s One Village One Product and Thailand’s One Tambon One Product movements, has become a cornerstone of Vietnam’s rural development policy, designed to restructure the agricultural sector and strengthen the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises in the countryside. Yet the program has a documented weakness: product lines are frequently undifferentiated, innovation rates remain low, and firms struggle to sustain a competitive presence beyond their local markets. That gap between institutional ambition and firm-level performance is precisely what motivated Huynh Nguyen Tuong An, Nguyen Quoc Cuong, and Nguyen Ngoc Thuc of the Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City to investigate what actually drives product innovation among these enterprises.

The theoretical scaffolding of the study draws on three established frameworks. Entrepreneurial Orientation Theory, developed by Lumpkin and Dess and rooted in earlier work by Danny Miller, describes a firm’s strategic posture through three dimensions: innovativeness, the tendency to generate and pursue new ideas; proactiveness, the drive to anticipate and seize market opportunities before competitors; and risk-taking, the willingness to commit resources to ventures with uncertain outcomes. Dynamic Capabilities Theory, proposed by Teece and colleagues, explains how firms sense opportunities and reconfigure internal resources to adapt to rapid environmental change. Institutional Theory, meanwhile, emphasizes that formal structures such as government programs, regulations, and policy incentives shape organizational behavior, particularly in transition economies where firms operate under constraints that differ fundamentally from those in developed markets.

What makes the study methodologically distinctive is its unified model. Rather than treating business model innovation and technology capability as separate curiosities, the researchers positioned them as co-mediators, two parallel conduits through which entrepreneurial orientation flows into product outcomes. Business model innovation, defined by Foss and Saebi as a designed, novel change to the key elements of how a firm creates, delivers, and captures value, operates at the level of business logic. Technology capability, the ability to acquire, assimilate, and deploy technology, operates at the level of technical execution. On top of this dual mediation, the researchers layered a moderator: perceived institutional support, the degree to which firms believe government assistance, policy incentives, and program support are genuinely available to them.

To test this architecture, the team applied partial least squares structural equation modeling using SmartPLS software on survey data collected between May and October 2025. Respondents were owners, managers, and senior staff of OCOP enterprises across major provinces of Vietnam’s Southeast region, selected through purposive sampling because no comprehensive public registry of these firms exists. Of 500 initial responses, 480 survived data screening after incomplete or uniform questionnaires were removed, a sample size that comfortably exceeds both the ten-times rule minimum of 258 and the 138 participants required by an a priori power analysis conducted in G*Power. All constructs were measured on five-point Likert scales adapted from validated instruments, including Covin and Slevin’s entrepreneurial orientation scale, Clauss’s business model innovation measure, and Frishammar and Hörte’s new product development performance items.

The statistical rigor extended well beyond the basics. The measurement model showed all outer loadings above 0.70, composite reliability values surpassing 0.70, and average variance extracted above 0.50, while heterotrait-monotrait ratios confirmed that the constructs were empirically distinct. Common method bias, a chronic concern in self-reported cross-sectional surveys, was addressed both procedurally, through respondent anonymity, separated questionnaire sections, and pilot testing with 40 respondents, and statistically, through Harman’s single-factor test, which found the first factor accounted for only 33.028 percent of variance, and full collinearity assessment, in which all variance inflation factors fell below the 3.3 threshold. The model explained 52.2 percent of the variance in new product development performance, with Stone-Geisser Q-squared values confirming medium-to-strong predictive relevance.

The headline result is a striking asymmetry among the three entrepreneurial traits. Proactiveness and risk-taking each exerted a direct, statistically significant positive effect on new product development performance, while innovativeness failed to reach significance in the direct path. Yet innovativeness was far from irrelevant: all six indirect pathways through business model innovation and technology capability were significant at the 0.1 percent level, indicating that creativity works only when it is embedded in reconfigured value architectures and strengthened technical foundations. For proactiveness and risk-taking, both direct and indirect effects were significant, marking business model innovation and technology capability as partial mediators. Business model innovation emerged as the single most influential driver of product performance, with a medium effect size, while the effect sizes of innovativeness and institutional support on the outcome were negligible in the direct paths.

The moderating analysis added a further nuance. Perceived institutional support significantly amplified the effects of both innovativeness and proactiveness on product performance, with 95 percent bootstrapped confidence intervals excluding zero, and simple slope analysis showed the innovativeness-performance slope turning from negligible to strongly positive as institutional support rose. But the same amplification did not hold for risk-taking: although the interaction coefficient was positive, its confidence interval included zero, meaning the moderation was not supported at the conventional level. The authors interpret this as evidence that star-rating promotion standards and market access support do not sufficiently reduce the uncertainty firms face when committing resources to genuinely uncertain product development bets. In other words, government support helps firms be creative and seize opportunities, but it does not yet insure them against the downside of bold bets.

The practical implications ripple outward from the rice paddies and workshops of Dong Nai, Tay Ninh, and Binh Phuoc to the broader debate on innovation in emerging economies. Successful OCOP firms, the study shows, tend to restructure their business models through multi-platform sales channels, e-commerce applications, livestream commerce, and agricultural experience tourism, while investing in preservation technology, deep processing, and automation to improve quality, extend product life cycles, and shorten commercialization timelines. For managers, the message is that entrepreneurial orientation alone is a necessary but insufficient condition; it must be paired with deliberate business model reconfiguration and technology investment. For policymakers, the findings argue for transparent, accessible support systems, financial incentives, innovation management training, and digital transformation assistance that convert perceived support into real innovation capacity. The authors caution that the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, the single-region sample limits generalizability, and self-reported measures introduce potential bias, calling for longitudinal and multi-source replication. Still, in a program meant to lift rural livelihoods toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the lesson is clear: in Vietnam’s countryside, boldness and foresight pay, but only when creativity is given the organizational machinery to become a product.

Subject of Research: How entrepreneurial orientation dimensions affect new product development performance among OCOP enterprises in Vietnam, with business model innovation and technology capability as mediators and perceived institutional support as a moderator.

Article Title: Investigating the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and new product development performance

Article References: An, H. N. T., Cuong, N. Q., & Thuc, N. N. (2026). Investigating the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and new product development performance. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 247. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00605-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00605-1

Keywords: entrepreneurial orientation, new product development performance, business model innovation, technology capability, perceived institutional support, OCOP enterprises, Vietnam, SMEs, PLS-SEM, dynamic capabilities, institutional theory, rural development