Resource-Based View and Sustainable Advantage: A Framework for SMEs

As firms struggle to regroup their business efforts after Covid-19, significant focus turns to strategically using their resources to competitively outmanoeuvre their rivals through utilizing their human capital, social capital, and brand reputations in their performance. This research scrutinizes the relationship between the intangible resources of human resources practices, brand reputation and sustainable competitive advantage of SMEs through the lens of the RBV as a tool for strategic marketing management\textendashan underexplored area in marketing research\textendashusing SEM model. The analysis of primary data collected from 128 SMEs operating in Lebanon reveals the existence of a positive impact of social capital on competitive advantage and shows that competent human capital has a positive impact on both competitive advantage and reputation of Lebanese SMEs. In addition, findings indicate that reputation leads to enhancing both competitive advantage and performance. Finally, the results show that the competitive advantage has a positive impact on SMEs performance during uncertain periods. These findings provide valuable insights into RBV, supporting the belief that human and social capital resources are key success factors for SMEs during uncertain periods, which can be of great significance for strategic marketing managers to help them strengthen the position of their SMEs in emerging markets during difficult times. \textcopyright 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Sunflower and climate change: Possibilities of adaptation through breeding and genomic selection

Due to its ability to grow in different agroecological conditions and its moderate drought tolerance, sunflower may become the oil crop of preference in the future, especially in the light of global environmental changes. In the field conditions, sunflower crop is often simultaneously challenged by different biotic and abiotic stresses, and understanding the shared mechanisms contributing to two or more stresses occurring individually or simultaneously is important to improve crop productivity under foreseeable complex stress situations. Exploitation of the available plant genetic resources in combination with the use of modern molecular tools for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and application of genomic selection (GS) could lead to considerable improvements in sunflower, especially with regard to different stresses and better adaptation to the climate change. In this chapter we present a review of climate-smart (CS) traits and respective genetic resources and tools for their introduction into the cultivated sunflower, thus making it the oil crop resilient to the extreme climatic conditions and well-known and emerging pests and diseases. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019