Small Manufacturing Firms’ Involvement in International E-business Activities

Innovation and Internationalization of Young Entrepreneurial Firms

“…The variable we want to explain, internationalization dummy, is expressed by the GEM variable teayyint and is built on the teaexp5c variable (see Table 1). This variable identifies early-stage entrepreneurial firms with at least 25% of their customers living abroad that are between three and 42 months old, which is consistent with the definition of early international firms from Servais et al (2007) Notes: * Names of the GEM variables that are used to build the estimation variables are in parenthesis. The exact GEM survey questions and answers are presented in Appendix 3.…”

Do Born Global SMEs Reap More Benefits from ICT Use than Other Internationalizing Small Firms?

“…As pointed out above, existing empirical results seem to indicate a difference in internet reliance between born globals and non-born globals (Servais et al 2007). In addition, industry sector, export experience (Vahlne and Johanson 2002) and internet technology experience (Berry et al 2004) may have a potential impact on the success of a fi rm's performance.…”

“…The underlying assumption is that born global fi rms are relatively small and limited in terms of their resource endowments (Hodgkinson 2008). Hence, there is the suggestion that they deploy the internet in order to proactively counterbalance these initial limitations (Kotha et al 2001;Servais et al 2007). Given the importance of technology leadership, including the reliance on ICT for the success of born globals (Knight and Cavusgil 2005), the number of empirical studies investigating their ICT deployment strategies is surprisingly limited (Gabrielsson and Gabrielsson 2010).…”

“…Servais et al (2007) went beyond a simple deployment analysis and investigated the diff erence between born global and non-born global fi rms in terms of internet use. Their results show that born global fi rms rely on the internet more intensively than their non-born global counterparts.…”

“…The question of 'how' to deploy the internet cannot be separated from the context of deployment. There is empirical evidence that young and fast-growing fi rms, also termed 'born globals', rely greatly on ICT as a growth facilitator (for example, Arenius et al 2005;Servais et al 2007;Hodgkinson 2008). However, rapid growth cannot be equated with better fi nancial performance.…”