From Readiness to Resilience: How Strategic Agility and Flexibility Enhance Entrepreneurial Outcomes through Strategic Intelligence

Entrepreneurial organizations are becoming both volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) operating environments, and nimbleness and flexibility is the sole survival tactic. Based on the Dynamic Capabilities View (DCV), this paper explores how strategic agility, strategic flexibility and strategic intelligence are influenced to create entrepreneurial results of growth, resilience and profitability. The study incorporates the use of regression and bootstrapped mediation analysis based on the survey data of 300 entrepreneurial firms in various industries whereby seven hypotheses were tested. The findings confirm that agility and flexibility have positive correlations with the outcomes, and both agility capabilities and agility flexibility are significant predictors of strategic intelligence. The outcomes of strategic intelligence are also improved and these points illustrate the importance of strategic intelligence as a separate performance driver. Nevertheless, mediation tests show that the intelligence is not important in  mediating the connection between agility, flexibility, and results. Such results indicate that agility and flexibility have their strongest impacts that are direct and that intelligence is a supplementary resource and not a mediating mechanism. Theoretically, the research disaggregates a portion of the black box in DCV, by placing intelligence as a key but autonomous construct. As a practical suggestion, it recommends entrepreneurs to strike a balance between agility and flexibility and investments in intelligence systems to enhance resilience and competitiveness in unpredictable markets.