Emerging economies have a dynamic and challenging business environment, which requires entrepreneurial marketing and innovation capabilities of the high-tech startups. Such startups are usually faced with issues of lack of resources, regulation and lack of proper infrastructure. In this regard, it is important to combine entrepreneurial marketing practices, which involve recognition of opportunities, sensing of the market, interaction with customers, and risk-taking, with innovation competencies. Startups are able to introduce new services, products and solutions using innovation capabilities, which include technological development, research and development (R&D), knowledge management and adaptive learning processes to create a competitive advantage in the long term. This paper will seek to investigate the connection between entrepreneurial marketing and innovation capabilities, how the two elements can be used to motivate the performance of the high-tech startups in the emerging markets. The study is founded upon quantitative and qualitative data gathering among high-tech startups founders, CEOs, and key managers of 150 startups located in different emerging economies. There was the collection of quantitative information in the form of Likert scale surveys which measured marketing practices in entrepreneurship, innovation capabilities and external influences of government support and external networks. Semi-structured interviews were used to achieve qualitative data to obtain a more insight into the role played by marketing strategies in facilitating innovation and the challenges involved in applying these strategies in a resource-limited context. The SPSS and R were used to conduct statistical analysis in examining the relationships between the variables. The results showed that there existed strong positive relationships between entrepreneurial marketing practices and innovation capabilities, and customer engagement had the greatest relationship with product innovation (0.80) and technological innovation (0.72). The regression showed that entrepreneurial marketing is a significant predictor of innovation performance, with market orientation and customer engagement as the most important ones. Also, moderation analysis in SPSS through the PROCESS macro demonstrated that government support and external networks had a significant moderating effect on the relationship between entrepreneurial marketing and innovation capabilities, where external networks had the highest moderating effect (0.45, p = 0.05). The results support the relevance of entrepreneurial marketing as an agent of innovation capabilities in high-tech startups in emerging economies.
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