The dynamics of internationalization in small and medium-sized enterprises from a European small open economyessays exploring the earliness, post-internationalization speed, managerial influences, and the impact of environmental technological transformations

Resumo

There is a growing interest in international business literature on how individuals and their cognition drive the firms’ internationalization (Aharoni et al., 2011; Maitland & Sammartino, 2015). The decision-making process related to appropriate location, type, mode and timing of foreign market entry are dependent on managerial thinking (Clark et al., 2018). Similarly, based on the explanatory power of Uppsala Model (Vahlne & Johanson, 2017), understanding the cognitive microfoundations of individual decision-makers is critical to capture how internationalization process evolves from one stage to another (Coviello et al., 2017; Vahlne & Johanson, 2019). At the same time, digitalization is considered one of the main trends changing society and business models (Sweden, 2016; Parsiainen et al., 2017; Ritter & Pedersen, 2020). According to Johanson & Vahlne (2009), digitalization facilitates knowledge acquisition and creates an environment where young exporters can learn fast, investing on early and rapid internationalization. This doctoral thesis explores the lack of models that relate managerial cognition, dual network capability, and Industry 4.0 technologies with the earliness and post-internationalization speed, as well as the lack of frameworks which address the contingent role of the earliness of internationalization on the relationship between post-internationalization speed and performance, frame worked by the Dual-Process theory, the Uppsala model, and the International Entrepreneurship theory within its learning advantages of newness (LAN). Therefore, the main objective of this research is to analyze in depth the questions about the speed of the entire internationalization process and its effect on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) performance. More specifically, we apply such approach to SMEs in a European small open economy (SMOPEC) – Portugal. For this purpose the dissertation includes nine chapters, six of which comprise the empirical essays undertaken to answer the research questions that have been posed.