ABSTRACT
Iso Cara1 was one of 360,000 Turkish Bulgarians who left Bulgaria in 1989 to make a new life in Turkey. He was a welder, who started an entrepreneurial venture with his wife. He opened a store in the luggage trade to benefit from the rush of Russian entrepreneurs with an idea that was deceptively simple: He would source fine leather and high-quality accessories like zippers and clasps in Italy, manufacture wallets, mobile phone cases, and other leather fashion goods in Istanbul, and then sell them in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Years later, Cara’s fashion firm, Neroli, is highly successful. He
sells several million dollars’ worth of leather goods every year in a market that established global leather brands have found too risky. And he does so without selling a single bag or wallet in his home market. Cara’s story shows how the nature of entrepreneurship is shifting. In
the past, men like him would build their new ventures in their domestic market long before they’d expand globally. Now these same entrepreneurs have the opportunity and challenge of participating in a highly internationalized market from the moment they are founded. These “born global” firms face a very different challenge from their
more traditional, domestically focused counterparts, which leads us to ask: Why do they internationalize at founding, and what factors drive their success – or their failures? What are the complex dynamics surrounding this increasingly common form of business in our rapidly evolving business landscape?
