Strategic Decoupling Cycles: Short-Term Strategy–Performance Disconnect as a Path to Long-Term Advantage in Exporting MSMEs

Model and test “strategic decoupling cycles,” where firms invest in capabilities and positioning that depress near-term export performance but create later competitive advantage and superior performance. This posits a deliberate temporal decoupling—firms knowingly endure a performance trough as they build capabilities (e.g., quality standards, channel relationships) that later unlock advantage. It challenges the norm of synchronous strategy–performance linkages by foregrounding timing and sequencing, integrating dynamic capabilities and learning-curve effects into MSME contexts. It extends prior work by embedding sustainable marketing capabilities within these cycles and testing age-related learning moderators. This explains why well-designed strategies underperform early and why older firms benefit more due to experience-based absorptive capacity. The impact includes practical playbooks for MSMEs to plan capability-building phases without prematurely abandoning good strategies. Methods include panel data with distributed lags, event-history around certification/adoption milestones, and agent-based simulation of capability accumulation.

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