The Internationalization Speed of SMEs and their Long-term Sustainability in Foreign Markets
This chapter analyzes the motivation and factors that accelerate the internationalization process, comparing the pre- and post-entry stages and its consequences for long-term sustainability in a single case of a Brazilian TBF. Permanence emerges in this c
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The Internationalization Speed of SMEs and their Long-term Sustainability in Foreign Markets Beatrice Maria Zanellato Fonseca Mayer, Dinorá Eliete Floriani, and Mohamed Amal
Introduction This chapter discusses the speed and the long-term sustainability of firm’s internationalization. The analysis focuses on the firm and its internationalization process in a temporal perspective, exploring small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) technology-based firm (TBF). Preliminary studies about internationalization speed (Oviatt and McDougall 2005) focused on the time between inception and start of internationalization (Chetty and Campbell- Hunt 2004), but not on the subsequent period once internationalization has started (Chetty et al. 2014). That is, most of the studies on internationalization speed have been based on the analysis of the time in which a company initiates its international activities (Chetty et al. 2014). The post-entry period, as an important part of internationalization process, is still under-investigated (Ibeh et al. 2018), especially the post-entry speed of internationalization (Romanello and Chiarvesio 2019). Such approach can advance the international entrepreneurship literature in several ways. First, in the existing literature, consistent results have pointed to the antecedents that lead to accelerated internationalization (Oviatt and McDougall 2005; Hilmersson et al. 2017), as well as the characteristics of the companies that
B. M. Z. F. Mayer (*) • D. E. Floriani • M. Amal UNIVALI, Itajaí, Brazil e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 S. H. Park et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Corporate Sustainability in the Digital Era, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42412-1_6
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present fast internationalization (Dzikowski 2018). However, what happens after the entry in foreign markets and its implications over time are yet to be explored (Hilmersson and Johanson 2016). Second, we believe that the factors that promote and influence the pre- internationalization are different in post-internationalization (Efrat and Shoham 2012). Albeit the term “long-term sustainability” is not approached literally in the literature; it can be seen as a kind of consequence of post-entry internationalization, as it goes beyond performance, growth, and survival. In our understanding, studies that address the topic of survival in the internationalization context are too deterministic, as they mostly focus on whether the firm is still alive or not (Carr et al. 2010; Sapienza et al. 2006). In this study, we argue that long-term sustainability can be seen as an output of post-entry internationalization, related to the post-entry stage. Some of the consequences of post-entry internationalization speed analyzed as an output of internationalization are performance, survival, and international growth. The existing literature, when focusing on such post-entry outcomes, may be narrow and does not allow a more dynamic perspective of this level of firm’s international c
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