International Business Review – Volume 26, pp. 1157-1167
Liabilities and benefits: Examining the two sides of the foreignness coin from entrepreneurial perspective
Arpita Joardar, Sibin Wu
This paper provides an in-depth examination of foreignness at the individual level by studying it in the context of entrepreneurs. Based on data collected from 470 domestic and foreign entrepreneurs operating in the U.S., it was concluded that foreignness has a curvilinear relationship with entrepreneurial performance. There was also evidence of moderating effects of entrepreneurial orientation on the relationship between foreignness and performance. Implications of the findings are discussed.
Journal of Business Research – Volume 96, pp 250-263
SMEs’ Internationalisation: When does innovation matter?
George Saridakisa, Bochra Idris , Jared M. Hansen , Leo Paul Dana
The objective of this research is threefold: first, to investigate the role of goods, service, and process innovation on SMEs’ internationalisation (i.e., exporting); second, to investigate the association between innovation’s degree of novelty (radical innovation vs. incremental innovation) and SMEs’ internationalisation; and, third, to examine the combined effect of different types of innovation and the degrees of novelty of innovation on firms’ internationalisation and compare the findings with their individual effects. Data from 12,823 SMEs in the United Kingdom support the concept that innovative SMEs are more likely to export than non-innovative SMEs; however, the link between innovation and internationalisation differs according to the type of innovation introduced and the degree of novelty of the innovation. Of importance to managerial practice, the combined effects of different types and degrees of novelty of innovation are greater than their individual effects, creating a synergy or amplified effect.
International Marketing Review – published online: https://doi.org/10.1108/IMR-03-2017-0059
Capitalising on knowledge from big-science centres for internationalisation
Tõnis Eerme, Niina Nummela
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how resource-constrained, knowledge-intensive firms capitalise on the knowledge from collaboration with big-science centres. It pays particular attention to what kind of knowledge a firm obtains and how it can be efficiently used in exploring and exploiting opportunities in international markets. The empirical basis for the study is a longitudinal case study of knowledge-intensive Estonian companies that collaborate with the European Space Agency (ESA). A rich data set was collected over three years. By studying the inward and outward activities of the two case companies collaborating with the ESA, the authors found that the internationalisation process of these firms had unique characteristics. Their international expansion was not driven by increasing market knowledge and reducing risk or uncertainty, but by resource seeking for research and development efforts. It was a cyclical, non-linear process, which was advanced by co-creation, learning and exploitation of the emergent knowledge, leading to an improved network position and identification of further opportunities. Collaboration with big-science centres provides companies with access to diverse types of knowledge. However, its impact on the future success in internationalisation also depends on other factors, such as the firm’s absorptive capacity and technological competence. Governments invest substantially on the development of big-science centres with the expectation that they would have significant knowledge spillovers on the technology development. A more qualitative approach to impact assessment opens new ideas how to develop their activities and in particular their collaboration with SMEs.
Administrative Science Quarterly – published online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839218792837
Waking from Mao’s Dream: Communist Ideological Imprinting and the Internationalization of Entrepreneurial Ventures in China
Christopher Marquis, Kunyuan Qiao
We theorize how an ideological imprint—ideology formed through past events—serves as an information filter that persistently affects individuals’ decision making and how subsequent behaviors of the imprinter—the entity that established the imprint—may alter it. We test our model with a longitudinal dataset of Chinese private entrepreneurs from 1993 to 2012, investigating the influence of a founder’s communist ideological imprint, which characterizes foreign capitalism as evil, and subsequent dynamics introduced by the imprinter—the Communist Party–led government of China—on two internationalization strategies that deal with foreign investors and markets: firms’ efforts to attract foreign capital and to expand globally. Our findings show that Chinese entrepreneurs’ communist ideological imprint negatively affects the internationalization of their ventures, while available and credible information contradicting communism—coming from the government directly, government-created industry social networks for entrepreneurs, or observing governmental support of internationalization—weakens the influence of the imprint. Our study contributes to a better understanding of imprinting and its decay, the effects of corporate decision makers’ political ideology, and the internationalization of firms.