Learning Processes During Re-internationalization: A Case Study of Chinese SMEs

Abstract

Understanding how and why firm behave differently during re-internationalization has increasingly been at a premium in international business research. We conducted a case study of eleven Chinese international SMEs and explored how they learned and recovered from involuntary deinternationalization. From case data, the "complete" re-internationalizers learned the lessons of foreign market exits more proactively than "partial" re-internationalizers. The complete reinternationalizers adopted internal and external sources of knowledge acquisition, "middle-up-down" information distribution and ambivalent information interpretation, while the partial reinternationalizers relied on internal sources of knowledge, "top-down" or "bottom-up" information distribution and univalent information interpretation. Our study contributes by identifying the crucial role of learning processes to complete re-internationalization, which is absent in existing re-internationalization research.

Development Trends of Digital Transformation in Entrepreneurship and Innovation: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…The born-digital firms are those founded in the internet era with a global value chain and proposition while going-digital firms are traditional firms transitioned to digital by a new value proposition through innovation in product, services, business model, and improved internal business processes. There are several concepts introduced using various methodologies for borndigital or going digital firms: liability of ecosystem integration (Rong, Kang, & Williamson, 2022), cross-side network interaction (Liu, Wu, & Song, 2022), strategic vs operational digital transformation (Yu, Fletcher, & Buck, 2022), and recombinant firm-specific advantages (Gooderham et al, 2022), and various SME internationalization capabilities through digital platforms, the internet and social media (Brieger et al, 2022;Ipsmiller et al, 2021;Lee et al, 2022). The impact and implication of digital technology in international strategy has widened as there are still unknown opportunities for research on the competition and interaction between firms in the blurring boundaries, demand side innovation and firm capabilities to develop and maintain a global value chain, digital platform technology variation, context (small and large firms), measurement (single item vs multiple items), time (cross-sectional and longitudinal), alternatives of moderating effects, and interaction between various stakeholders, and also the role of digital ecosystems in firm internationalization.…”