Sustainable Competitive Intelligence for Institutional Resilience: Crisis Response and Sustainable Development in Private Universities

Abstract

Purpose: This study examines how private universities convert environmental intelligence into institutional sustainable development (ISD), testing whether organizational resilience mediates the relationship between crisis response and ISD. Drawing on competitive intelligence and complemented by dynamic capabilities theory, it treats crisis response and resilience as the utilization and feedback stages of an institution-level intelligence capability that supports a sustainable competitive position.

Methodology/approach: Guided by a competitive-intelligence and dynamic-capabilities framework, a cross-sectional survey was administered to faculty members and administrators of private universities in Yunnan, China, yielding 742 valid responses. Constructs were validated through confirmatory factor analysis; the mediation model was tested with hierarchical regression and bias-corrected bootstrapping (5,000 resamples), controlling for gender, age, and leadership level.

Originality/Relevance: The study reframes crisis response and organizational resilience as components of an institution-level competitive-intelligence capability, which is the utilization and feedback stages of the intelligence cycle that underpins a university's sustainable competitive advantage, and provides rare evidence from resource-constrained, non-elite private higher education.

Key findings: Crisis response positively predicted organizational resilience (β = .33) and ISD (total effect β = .49), and resilience positively predicted ISD (β = .32). Resilience partially mediated the crisis response–ISD relationship (indirect effect = .11; 95% CI [.076, .136]), accounting for roughly 22% of the total effect. All four hypotheses were supported.

Theoretical/methodological contributions: This study extends dynamic capabilities theory to the institutional level in higher education and links it to the competitive-intelligence literature, positioning crisis response and resilience as the utilization and feedback stages of an institutional intelligence system. Methodologically, it empirically establishes resilience as the mechanism linking crisis response to sustainability and validates a multidimensional instrument for reuse.