One size does not fit all: Strategy configurations, complex environments, and new venture performance in emerging economies

•New ventures face competitive and external challenges as they seek high performance.•This requires a holistic set of market and non-market strategies.•We employ an asymmetric configurational perspective to analyze these strategies.•We identify six different strategy configurations for high performance. New ventures face a variety of competitive and external challenges as they seek high performance. This requires an assortment of market and non-market growth strategies best aligned with the complex environments they face. However, rather than holistically evaluating these multiple drivers of high performance, past research has primarily focused on a narrow subset of strategies and environmental conditions. We attribute this to a mismatch between studying causally complex relationships with conventional symmetric regression methods. Instead, we advocate for an asymmetric configurational perspective that tests the causal complexity of high and not-high venture performance. We employ fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to detect different strategy configurations of entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation, and political networking amid complex environments of hostility, dysfunctional competition, and lack of institutional support for nearly 200 Chinese new ventures. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach with an “either/or” trade-off, our main findings reveal six pathways with different configurations for high performance: either entrepreneurial or market orientation – or both – are necessary for high performance, and there are no consistent pathways for unsuccessful ventures. This offers a more complete picture of how new ventures operate and explains why individually conflicting results can be true collectively. We also demonstrate how configurational theory and methods can be employed to analyze the complexities of entrepreneurship.