Journal of Business Venturing – Volume 33, Issue 3, 241-260
Are SMEs with immigrant owners exceptional exporters?
Horatio M., Morgan, Sui Sui, Matthias Baum
Immigrant owners possess valuable human and social capital from which small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) might derive advantages when internationalizing. According to this resource-based perspective, such advantages might be manifested in immigrant-owned SMEs’ enhanced ability to identify, evaluate, develop and exploit opportunities in international markets. However, a cognitive perspective offers an opposing view: insofar as immigrant owners are more prone to overconfidence than their non-immigrant counterparts when making internationalization decisions, immigrant-owned SMEs might reap less financial rewards from potentially high-risk international markets. We pit the two perspectives against each other theoretically and empirically by evaluating a) the relationship between business owners’ immigrant background and SMEs’ export intensity, and b) the extent to which such background moderates the relationship between SMEs’ export intensity and (risk-adjusted) financial performance. Based on a representative sample of 9977 Canadian SMEs, we find that the presence of immigrant owners positively impacts export intensity, but negatively moderates the relationship between export intensity and financial performance. We interpret this evidence, combined with supplementary analyses, as support for a cognitive theory of international entrepreneurship in general, and particularly in relation to the role and consequences of entrepreneurs’ immigrant background.
International Business Review – Volume 27, Issue 2, 443-454
Home country institutions, social value orientation, and the internationalization of ventures
Jie Chen, Sami Saarenketo, Kaisu Puumalainen
We examined how home country formal institutions and the venture’s value orientation influenced the venture’s likelihood of internationalization based on a data set that was adapted from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data in the year 2009, covering 7668 individual ventures in 25 countries. Better-developed home country formal institutions are found to have a supportive impact on the venture’s likelihood of internationalization. The supportive impact is also found to be weaker for socially oriented ventures than for profit-oriented ventures. The venture’s social value orientation negatively moderates the home country formal institutions–likelihood of internationalization relationship. The negative moderating effects can be explained as follows: Socially oriented ventures in the better-developed home country institutional environment are less likely to develop coping skills against uncertain and risky institutional environments, which are common in their host countries. Besides the theoretical contributions, this paper also highlights the implications for both business researchers and policy makers.
Management International Review – Volume 58, Issue 2, 251–280
Interactions Among Factors Driving and Inhibiting the Early Internationalization of Small, Young Technology Enterprises
Gongming Qian, Lee Li, Zhengming Qian
This study traces the early, rapid internationalization of small, young technology enterprises (SYTEs) to the interaction between industry dynamism and resource constraints. The evidence collected in this study shows that industry dynamism drives the speed of the internationalization and resource constraints inhibit it. Niche and strategic alliance strategies are found to mediate or moderate the relationships among resource constraints, industry dynamism and the speed. These mechanisms have important managerial implications.