Explaining sustainable competitiveness through international success and open innovation in SMCEs: The moderating role of digital alliance capability

Nowadays, achieving success and sustainable competitiveness by firms, especially for SMEs, is very difficult due to limited resources. Therefore, achieving this goal requires firms to be creative, to use new approaches and strategies to enter international markets. Therefore, purpose of this study is to investigate the moderating role of digital alliance in the relationship between international open innovation, international success and sustainable competitiveness among small and medium creative enterprises. This research is a hypothetical and inferential study that has practical implications. The statistical population of the research includes small and medium creative enterprises (SMCEs) of Iran. The data collected by structural equation modeling method were analyzed by SPSS24 and SmartPLS3 software. The collected data have been analyzed by structural equation modeling and partial least squares. Findings show that international open innovation has a direct effect on international success and sustainable competitiveness. The mediating role of international success in relationship between international open innovation and sustainable competitiveness was found to be significant. On the other hand, the relationship between international open innovation and international success is also moderated by digital alliance capability. By presenting a new conceptual model, this study showed that small and medium creative enterprises need international open innovation and digital alliance capabilities to achieve sustainable competition, which are important for their international success.