Leveraging bricolage for innovation: exploring the potential of entrepreneurial orientation in hostile business environments

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a pivotal role in both global and developing economies, yet they grapple with significant resource limitations and challenging environments. The lack of innovation and entrepreneurial focus among SMEs has heightened their failure rates. Addressing this gap, our study explores ‘bricolage’ – the practice of making the most of available resources – as a solution for SMEs confronting innovation crises in emerging contexts. Drawing on resource-based perspectives and dynamic capabilities, data from 383 SMEs were used to analyse bricolage’s impact on innovation performance. It delves into the interplay between bricolage, dynamic capabilities, entrepreneurial orientation, and innovation. The findings reveal that bricolage positively influences innovation, amplified by entrepreneurial orientation and mediated by dynamic capabilities. These results underscore bricolage’s significance in leveraging limited resources for innovative outcomes. The study offers valuable insights for both theory and practical application, emphasising how firms excel by creatively utilising existing resources amid constraints.