Introduction: the emergence of international entrepreneurship (IE) and its agents – selected issues

Abstract

The popular emergence of the concepts ‘Born Global’ and ‘International New Ventures’ can be traced back to business and consulting reports in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the decade of the 1980s, the richness, diversity and appeal of international markets to smaller and younger firms became apparent and the report of their efforts appeared in the popular business press. For example, the business press featured articles on smaller American firms surging ahead in international markets or small firms and big exports in the early 1990s (Loane 2005). A consulting study for the Australian Manufacturing Council (McKinsey & Co. 1993) pointed to a pattern of systemic international activities of a large number of smaller Australian exporters and Rennie (1993) reported on a large number of smaller Australian firms that had engaged in substantive exporting in the early stages of their lifespan and called them ‘Born Globals’, which is viewed as a conceptual milestone. In an editorial piece, Cavusgil (1994) referred to the ‘Born Global’ phenomenon as a ‘quiet revolution’ in scholarly international business. The early contributions of Oviatt and McDougall (1994), Knight and Cavusgil (1996) and Knight (1997) introduced and examined some aspects of the emerging phenomenon of smaller firms’ internationalization. These early reports indicated that smaller firms had been expanding abroad rather than growing in the home market in the early stages of their lifespan; although they did not report on the distribution of age, size and speed or scope of these firms’ internationalization. Early internationalization by smaller and younger firms was already a substantive conceptual and also a practical deviation from the state of received theory of international business at the time, at least in the following aspects: