ABSTRACT
The globalization of the world economy has had a dramatic impact on small-and medium-sized enterprises, both in terms of challenges and opportunities. The demise of the nation-state and the stand-alone firm as the primary macroeconomic players – combined with a decrease in protectionist policies and boundaries between domestic and international markets – has resulted in an environment where both small and large firms can engage in international activity from the outset. This is a relatively new phenomenon, one that was first mentioned in a scholarly article in 1988 by banker J.F. “Chip” Morrow, who pointed out that “booming international banking and financial markets produce unprecedented opportunities for today’s entrepreneurs.” In the years that followed, many other writers and academic researchers have become interested in the topic of international entrepreneurship. The early body of work focused on the motivation, pattern, and pace
of accelerated internationalization by small-and medium-sized new ventures, also variously referred to as born globals, global start-ups, instant exporters, micro-multinationals, and international ventures. In an attempt to understand such firms, researchers followed network theory, knowledge management and resource-based view, transaction cost theory, organizational learning, and product life cycle theory. While insightful and enlightening, the research has lacked a unified
framework to connect the antecedents, types, and outcomes of entrepreneurial activities pursued by such new ventures. In addition, most of these studies were based on samples of firms from the United States. The exceptions were studies of born globals in Finland, New Zealand, and Portugal. These studies and those that use US data have evolved independently of each other, leading to little congruence in theory building that would account for the potential differences in international entrepreneurship across countries.
