Many firms experience abrupt or continuous changes in their business environment.Searching for opportunities to renew its operations can be critical to a firm’s successful performance in such circumstances. The constructs of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and dynamic capabilities (DC) have separately received substantial attention in scholarly work on opportunities and firm performance. There is a lack of research, however, on both EO and DC as a part of a framework that includes circumstances, actions and consequences, and how the two constructs possibly relate to one another. 

The dissertation addresses these gaps by examining the role of entrepreneurial orientation and dynamic capabilities in firm performance. It especially seeks answers to what different ways exist for a renewal of a firm to improve its performance, what alternative roles EO and DC may have in firm performance and what empirical support these roles receive. The study applies two theoreticallenses: evolutionary and resource-based views of the firm. It adopts from the evolutionary view the concept of search routine and from the resource-based view the valuable, rare, inimitable and nonsubstitutable (VRIN)-qualities of resources. A cross-sectional survey was utilized as a data collection method in the empirical analysis. The data comprised 495 firms from the food industry, media sector and marine cluster in Finland. The structural equation modeling method was applied for the data analysis. 

The existing research on opportunities can be categorized into four search types: optimizing, positioning, disruption and accumulation. Each search type involves specific internal and external conditions, actions and consequences and fit between these elements. The study highlights the importance of firmcontrolled resources in successful firm performance. A firm arguably needs to possess either VRIN search resources or VRIN ordinary resources or both to possibly improve its performance. The study contributes to strengthening the theory base for entrepreneurial orientation and dynamic capabilities. It adds to the scholarly research by suggesting that EO and DC are closely related constructs that can be defined to be related to any of the four search types. Depending on how the property type of the construct is defined, EO and DC describe actions of search; alternatively, EO represents search preferences and DC represents search abilities. If actions and resources are considered to be intertwined, EO and DC form together a firm’s search routine, which can have a positive association with firm performance. The study takes the stance that there need not be a single, once-for-all definition for either EO or DC but this requires that a researcher be explicit about the selected conceptualization and its theoretical underpinnings, and then operationalize it accordingly.