Antecedent of firm innovativeness on competitive advantage of pharmaceutical business in Thailand

Abstract

During the last few years, the concept of regulatory search RS becomes important for many sectors and firms because it is a process of knowledge acquisition mainly about changes in the types of regulatory of an organization's external conditions. However, this article investigates the important effect of regulatory search on the competitive advantage of the pharmaceutical firms in Thailand through the role of firm innovativeness. The given research paper also examines the moderating role of slack environment on various relationships in the study. The effect of regulatory search has been examined in this paper using the survey data from about 435 employees of pharmaceutical firms of Thailand which include private firms as well. The given study used a self-generated scale to evaluate RS, which further consist of proactive and reactive RS. The results of the research study indicate that reactive RS can show a significant impact on the competitive advantage of the firm and results also show that firm innovativeness also has a positive impact on the relationship between reactive RS and CA of the firm. Furthermore, the outcomes of the study also manifest that slack moderates the relations between reactive and proactive search factors and competitive advantage in many ways.