Internationalization of SMEs: Toward a New Paradigm

Abstract

venturing abroad. Recently, scholars in the field of Entrepreneurship have questioned the universality of the stage-theory explanation of firm internationalization. They point to the inconsistency between the stage theory and the empirical reality of a growing number of entrepreneurially oriented firms, which tend to adopt a global focus from their conception. Not only do these new ventures lack a period of gradual internationalization, but they also tend to be small firms facing volatile markets with scant experience and resources. International Entrepreneurship, as a new field of inquiry, appears to have drawn both from International Business (traditionally focused on larger firms) and from Entrepreneurship, which primarily studies the entrepreneurial owner/ manager of small firms. Logically there is no conceptual barrier to the fusion of these two fields: larger firms can, in theory, act as entrepreneurs; and smaller entrepreneurial firms can take advantage of the vast opportunities of international markets previously exploited almost exclusively by larger firms. To explore and develop this emerging area of research, a pioneering, three-day conference was held in September 2000 at McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, under the joint auspices of McGill's Business and Management Research Centre, and the Dobson Centre for Entrepreneurial Studies. The conference brought together leading scholars from international business, and from small business/entrepreneurship, to stimulate integration of research in what had previously been widely divergent fields. Selected papers were subjected to a rigorous process of peer review and comments. Each was revised extensively to incorporate and to reflect the perspectives of other disciplines. The final product is a series of leading-edge research papers which are presented in this volume, as well as in two other publications.1 This collection opens with a study that tests empirically the degree to which International Entrepreneurship, as an emerging field of inquiry, draws on selective theory essentials from International Business and from Entrepreneurship. Hamid Etemad and Yender Lee searched for the evidence of fusion and cross-fertilization of each field's knowledge network. They report an accelerated emergence of International Entrepreneurship as a field of research through the late 1980s and 1990s, in terms of the number of scholarly publications. They also point to an increasing number of citations to works from both International Business and Entrepreneurship, as well as other fields. Their article sets the stage for examination of more detailed issues rooted in both International Business and Entrepreneurship. Final version accepted on October 2, 2001