The Power of Sustainability in the “Black Swan” Event: Entrepreneurial Cognition of Top Management Team and Dual Business Model Innovation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The issues raised by the authors are topical and interesting for the reader. It can be a source of inspiration for both theorists and practitioners. It can be a starting point for further scientific research.

The text is large and clear. The authors logically conduct a scientific argument.

The title indicates the subject matter discussed in the text. It seems to me that instead of the abbreviation "TMT" it should be "top management team"

The abstract is well written, comprehensive and sufficiently concise. The keywords are appropriate.

The introduction is very well written, setting the topic in context. It seems to me, however, that since the authors in the title and keywords refer to "Black Swan" Event, they should briefly characterize this phenomenon (what it means) in this part of the text.

The authors have performed a critical and comprehensive review of the literature (50 references). It is relevant to the subject matter and current (70% of the references are publications from 2017 or later, 40% from 2019 or later). The text does not contain self-citations. This part of the text has been divided into three sections: "Dual Business Model Innovation", "Entrepreneurial Cognition" and "Review Summary", which identifies the main research gaps.

In the "Hypotheses Proposed" section, on the basis of the analyzes (correct and logical reasoning), the authors formulated four main hypotheses and 18 detailed hypotheses. The conceptual model of "entrepreneurial cognition of TMT-knowledge search - dual business model innovation" proposed by the authors on Figure 1 is consistent and transparent.

Research Design - the description is clear. The process of collecting data and verifying the questionnaires that were returned was described in detail. The structure of the respondents was presented. It should be noted that the research sample is not large (219 people), but the research results may be an inspiration for other researchers. It should be clearly indicated which country the respondents were from (were the respondents only from Chinese companies?). This may be important for comparisons with studies by other authors.

The research process does not raise any objections. The authors explained the questions of their questionnaire in a logical and transparent manner and indicated the sources of this questionnaire.

The authors conducted all the necessary tests to verify the applied research tool. The internal consistency Cronbach's α value (α value) and the combined reliability (CR) were used for the reliability test. The validity tests are composed of content validity test, structural validity test, convergent validity test and discriminant validity test. All the scales were based on existing mature measurement tools, and the content of the items were revised by experts and typical subjects to ensure reliable content validity. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were used to assess structural validity. Harman's one-way test was also conducted which indicated that there was no serious common method bias.

The "Hypotheses Test" section is logical and clear. First, the authors performed correlation analysis on the variables and, on the basis of the obtained results, concluded that there is no multicollinearity among the variables, which is suitable for further investigation of the causal relationship through structural equation model. A structural equation model was applied with Mplus7.0. H1a-c and H2a-c hypotheses have been correctly verified. To demonstrate the existence of a mediating effect and to expose the path of the mediating effect more clearly, the authors used the full mediation effect model (M0) as the benchmark and develops three other nested models (partial mediation effect model a (M1), b (M2) and c (M3). The conducted analyzes have shown that the M3 model is the best model. Therefore, the authors applied it in order to obtain a more detailed mediation effect study. The H3a-f and H4a-f hypotheses have been verified correctly.

The conclusions are correctly formulated, based on the results of the previous analyzes. The authors indicated theoretical and practical implications of the research results as well as shortcomings and perspectives for further research.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We sincerely appreciate you for your valuable and detailed comments and suggestions. We have revised our paper according to your comments. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper has the ambition to demonstrate that dual business model innovation (DBMI) is the core force for enterprises to turn crises into opportunities and achieve their survival and sustainability.
 This study  based  on the upper echelon theory and the  hypotheses verificated bytaking  the date of 217TMTs.
The authors built an analysis model and highlighted the limitations of the research that do not allow a generalization of the results.
The paper can be the starting point for further investigations that reduce the principal  limits of research.
We invite authors to effect future studies can collect multi-source data to verify the findings of this paper.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We sincerely appreciate you for your valuable and detailed comments and suggestions. We have revised our paper according to your comments.Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper deals with a highly relevant topic and tries to expand the literature by analyzing the entrepreneurial cognition of TMT and dual business model innovation. I enjoyed reading the paper and endorse its publication. However, there are minor adjustments that could be adopted to improve the paper.

Introduction

The introduction is good, especially giving an overview of the research topic. However, the authors should give a brief overview of how this study was conducted and a glimpse of the data and methods used. In other words, the authors should add information about their methods very briefly. Similarly, the author should give more evidence to the objectives of this paper, as the hypotheses are presented in a later stage.

Theory

It’s a great section and highlights the main points about the theories used in the paper. Just a minor mistake, the paragraph “Existing research has set the theoretical groundwork for investigating the link between entrepreneurial cognition…” It ends with a “:” instead of a period. Please check it.

Hypotheses Test

This section is very descriptive and could improve if the authors rely on a more critical-analytical approach about what means these numbers to the study and its theory. The sentence “Table 6 illustrates the goodness of fit for the direct effect model, which demonstrates that all of the model’s fit indicators satisfy the criteria and the model fits well”. It should work in the structure to avoid repetition.

Results and Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the main findings but lacks to compare their results with the previous academic literature. I recommend the authors circle back with previous literature to show their contribution. I appreciate the division in different types of results’ implications but the authors are sometimes redundant, repeating implications that apply to the academic literature and the practice. I am sure it can be amended to bring it to a publishable standard for this journal, I wish the best of luck to the authors and congratulate them for their excellent paper.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We sincerely appreciate you for your valuable and detailed comments and suggestions. We have revised our paper according to your comments.Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx