Impact of entrepreneurial skills on firm competitiveness: A research in TRA2 region

In today's free market economy, sustaining the existence of businesses in the face of increased competitive process has started to be difficult day by day. In particular, advances in information and communication technologies, on the one hand, affects the structure of the business; whilst on the other hand have led to the formation of a more informed consumers and researchers. Within this in mind, businesses need to survive and to be able to grow, and to follow technological developments and to adapt the existing structure to these developments. Combined with a customer-focused approach, to achieve success in the competitive environment necessitates the need for entrepreneurs who have the ability and skills to coordinate the process the best way and to combine the parts in the system. Because, while entrepreneurs who have skills to make use of opportunities and threats from the external environment together with organizational features become successful, entrepreneurs who cannot see them or do not have qualifications, fail or are eliminated by the system. In this regard, by means of the work we have done, entrepreneurial skills of manufacturing and service enterprises operating in the provinces of Kars, Ardahan, Iğdır and Ağrı which formed the TRA2 region, and impact of these skills on the competitive process of the companies have been examined. For this purpose, questionnaires relevant to subject matter were applied to the entrepreneurs and the data obtained has been analyzed by "Structural Equation Model". According to the analysis results, it has been observed that there are personal, managerial and technical skill differences among the entrepreneurs operating in the region and these skills have affected the factors which are used in a competitive process of firms.