An Examination of the Identification and Exploitation of International Opportunities Among Chinese Traditional SMEs

Abstract

SMEs’ internationalization research focused mainly on measuring their international performance, especially in IT-based and knowledge-intensive industries while little attention was paid to investigating the opportunity-based view of firm internationalization especially in the context of traditional SMES. The main objectives of the present study were twofold. First, building on the opportunity-based view of firm internationalization, this study investigated the international opportunity identification (IOI) and international opportunity exploitation (IOE) among Chinese traditional SMEs. Second, this research examined the direct influence of SMEs managers' adaptive marketing capabilities (AMCs), global mindset (GM), and collaborative intensity (CI) on IOI and IOE with emphasis on the potential moderating influence of environmental dynamism (ED). The initial phase of this research employed exploratory interviews with eight SMEs managers. Exploratory findings showed that Chinese SMEs adopt both entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial internationalization behaviors in identifying and exploiting international opportunities. Later, an empirical investigation using 327 valid responses from managers/founders of traditional internationalized SMEs in China showed that AMCs, GM, and CI had a significant positive influence on both IOI and IOE. Further, ED was found to play a significant moderating impact on the relationship between AMCs and IOI, GM and IOI, and CI and IOE. This paper ends with clarifying a set of theoretical and practical implications.