Content
Naturally, the current study – albeit offering a nuanced and processual understanding of a successful digital firm – suffers from the limitations specific to qualitative studies. Therefore, future longitudinal and processual qualitative research as well as quantitative panel studies that could provide more insights into the applicability of our proposed model and its generalizability to different contexts would be welcome. Digital technologies enable entrepreneurial activity that incorporates novel technology and creates new business ventures. Consequently, there has recently been additional room for accelerated internationalization, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic (see e.g., Fraccastoro et al., 2021a).
Substantial IE research indicates the relevance of the firm’s culture as a set of shared values and beliefs that help firms’ members to understand organizational performance and thus provide norms for their behavior and actions in the organization . Such collective cognition serves the firm to pursue international opportunities and respond to external events they face . Thus, the firm’s culture becomes a source of sustainable competitive advantage, and, most importantly, it enables the employees to pursue and exploit foreign market opportunities . The IVs in the SBO dataset included education, immigrant status, previous start-up experience, start-up capital, and the number of employees. The IVs from the survey dataset included the firm’s age, annual sales, number of employees, CEO’s education level, the experience of studying/living/working abroad, immigration status, start-up and industry experience, and foreign language ability. Tables 1 and 2 provide the list of variables included in the research model, where the data was obtained from, and subsequent coding protocols.
EO-performance relationships in the context of “reverse internationalization”
Two of these approaches are the upper echelons (e.g., Acar, 2016; Hsu et al., 2013; Laufs et al., 2016; Tsao et al., 2018) and internalization (e.g., Verbeke et al., 2014) theories. Even though these perspectives have been used to study the internationalization of SMEs, their use has been limited. While California specifically, and the U.S. economy in general, has benefited from participation in global markets, a recent backlash against free trade policies across the world makes it even more important to better understand exactly what is needed from companies to integrate https://bookkeeping-reviews.com/ themselves into the global economy. Firm performance is a multidimensional construct in nature (Artz et al., 2003; Wu et al., 2021b), so its measurement needs to integrate different dimensions in empirical research . Past research has also obtained relative firm performance by measuring a firm’s financial standing compared with competitors in its industry (Palmer et al., 2019). Hence, we measured four dimensions of performance relative to competitors in terms of market share, operating profits, sales volume, and employee growth in accordance with these past measures.
The firm has faced many key events and made some great decisions throughout its existence despite its entrepreneurs having almost no prior international business experience or networks at the outset. Alpha’s success runs counter to the conventional wisdom on international business that holds entrepreneurs’ international experiential knowledge determines venture creation, growth, and foreign expansion (Eriksson et al., 1997; Kessler & Frank, 2009; Politis, 2005). Effectuation theory does not explain accelerated internationalization by inexperienced entrepreneurs running digital ventures; albeit the extension of the theory to interpret networking behavior is beneficial (Galkina & Chetty, 2015; Prashantham et al., 2019). The digital entrepreneurship stream of research has not addressed exceptional internationalization behavior either , although digitalization does have an intuitive appeal to explain this exceptional behavior. This study contributes to the academic literature in the rising field of international entrepreneurship, analyzing the early internationalization phenomenon at the entrepreneurial level addressed by Zucchella as a research direction needed for further scholarly work.
3 Environmental-level analysis
The entrepreneurs almost lost their financial independence and the firm failed to realize its international sales forecasts. However, Alpha’s entrepreneurs learned more about the game development industry and used that knowledge to develop new and better games. The entrepreneurs’ digital capability, which now included analytical skills and a specific understanding of the global mobile-game industry, prompted the move toward a causation-based strategic decision to commercialize their first mobile game . The game deliberately targeted consumers globally and, in time, proved an enormous success.
- The entrepreneurs recognized that internal networking could be strengthened within the incubator.
- Each country submits the respective country data-set to the GEM Data team, where they check various aspects of the data to make sure that it represents the whole population.
- Entrepreneurial self-efficacy will mediate the impact of entrepreneurial learning on firm performance.
- First, this study extends the research of the early stage of new ventures by focusing on the entrepreneurial learning behavior of nascent entrepreneurs.
The existing literature shows that ESE is effective in influencing goal commitment, aspiration levels, task persistence, and work attitude . For example, Individuals with high ESE tend to carry out risk-taking The Impact Of The Entrepreneurs Social Networks On The Performance Of The Firm During The Early Stages Of Internationalization or opportunity recognition behavior . Substantial research remains focused on the effectiveness of ESE in pursuing entrepreneurial careers and initiating a new venture (Newman et al., 2019).