Abstract

This exploratory research investigates how firms upgrade their strategic capabilities for superior returns of current markets and enable their entry into a new industry. The study explores how the current successful entrepreneurs build their organisation’s strategic capabilities and achieve their sustained strategic capabilities in today’s rapidly changing environment. As this is an exploratory study, a qualitative approach is used. We first interviewed the expert academicians in strategic management in order to validate and verify our research instrument. We then interviewed the sample successful entrepreneurs in the rubber industry in the South of Thailand on how they developed and adapted their strategies over time to sustain their competitiveness in the relevant product markets. Finally, a case study is used to illustrate how a successful company of latex product export industry became competitive in its new industry entry. This study finds that there is a positive systematic relationship between organisational strategic capabilities, namely resource-based capabilities (RBCs), knowledge-based capabilities (KBCs), network-based capabilities (NBCs), and organisational dynamic strategies. This relationship is linked to the development of a dynamic, process-oriented strategy that seeks to maintain a higher return on investment and to focus on new markets. This study contributes to the theoretical knowledge of strategic management, and its practical implication is that entrepreneurs should focus on developing dynamic capabilities of their firm to cope with the constantly changing environment nowadays.