Specifically, when competition is intensive, firms need to engage in risk-taking and entrepreneurial activities that require both learning and exploration to break out of price wars [70]. Such activities include innovating new products, exploring new markets, seeking novel ways to compete, and examining how to achieve differentiation [70]. In conditions of highly intensive competition, firms tend to pay more attention to their competitors. To differentiate themselves from their competitors, firms like to use their resources to invest in R&D and product innovation. In this situation, firms increasingly depend on CE activities to achieve higher product innovation performance. Accordingly, we propose the following hypothesis