In the ReInRe ‐research project we focus on recognizing successful firms and comparing their strategic choices to their peers. We aim at investigating how successful firms shape the renewal of manufacturing in selected industries. Accordingly, we define the potential for industry‐level renewal based on the firm‐level prevalence of new methods and processes of production, such as the use of new technologies, strategies supporting learning and resource reconfiguration, and firms’ innovation capability. These manifest the entrepreneurial behavior as firms’ strategy.

More specifically, the ReInRe‐project aims at:

1. 
   Exploring the strategies of successful (pioneering) firms and their peers in selected industries.  


2. 
   Investigating the deeper insights of the agents of change (firms) and what kind of relationship they have with their socio‐technical and institutional surroundings.


3. 
   Assessing the role of pioneering firms and their peers in the industry‐level renewal.  

We concentrate on food industry and industries related to ship building both of which are vital for the Finnish economy, and which have faced on‐going change. Empirically the project comprises two intertwined phases: quantitative analysis and qualitative studies which cover both case studies and workshop‐based data collection.  

Our findings this far suggest that firms’ strategic choices, which are assumed to enable above the average performance, seem not to be enough robust predictors of business performance over time. Even if some differences were found, they were not statistically significant. That being said, predicting the industry‐level change from the strategies of successful and less successful firms is not straightforward. Instead, our findings illustrate how firms, despite their categorization, emphasize different strategies that generate varying financial performance. Moreover, the findings suggest that strategies are not stagnant, but instead they need to be revised, adapted or sometimes even improvised in order to find a way to overcome barriers of success (see Eisenhardt et al., 2000).  

Based on the above our findings highlight that in policy making the cherry‐picking might not work (see Shane, 2009). Even if directing public policy interventions to the best and the brightest makes sense while the public finance is limited, the on‐going challenge stems from the difficult decision: To whom the public support should be directed at? Our findings highlight that it is difficult if not even impossible to find robust predictors of business performance which could later ease the pain of public policy making. In between the question remains: Where should policy makers look at if they are willing to picking up the winners among a certain population of firms?