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Journal of International Entrepreneurship

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19-12-2018

Early strategic heritage: The carryover effect on entrepreneurial firm’s life cycle

Author: Hamid Etemad

Published in: Journal of International Entrepreneurship | Issue 4/2018

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This article focuses on the nearly ignored origins and early drivers of competitiveness and their longer-run impacts in internationalizing, or internationalized, firms beyond inceptive stages. The challenging aim of this article is in identifying a fully encompassing and progressive evolutionary path of competitiveness for enabling growth and entrepreneurial internationalization from birth to maturity, conceived in the very early and inceptive stages and evolving into forces capable of sustaining the firm’s international entrepreneurial activities over time to a purposive maturity. A progressive evolution, based on solid early foundations (Aspelund et al. 2007), can support internationalization and strong growth. Conversely, weak foundations may lead to regressive evolution, stagnation, undesired retrenchments and possible de-internationalization (Benito 2005; Benito and Welch 1997; Crick 2002, 2004; Welch and Welch 2009). The recent development in the international environment has brought the importance of such issues to the fore. …

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This two-way recursive examination parallels the lasting influence of person’s genetic make-up, or biological DNA, on one’s state of health over time, which is not examined routinely; but the search for life-treating conditions may necessitate a retracing back to one’s inceptive make-up.

This stage shares characteristics of human pregnancy, where we know much less about the pre-birth state of the fetus before birth.

In contrast and beyond the protective processes, the field of marketing, for example, is deeply interested in promoting new products in the public market place as soon as possible and ensuring that they grow to maturity unhindered. As opposed to the somewhat opaque pre-birth stages of new products, the field of marketing has developed deep expertise in the launch of new products and their required support for consequent growth and internationalization, which has been the focus of IE enquiries.

In the paper, we will not further explore the possibility reaching Steady-state or Stagnation (Crick 2002 and 2004), where the firm operates steadily in terms of activities, size, revenues, and market share. However, international companies are less likely to experience this stage for long.

Etemad (2014a) has argued that universities have traditionally been well equipped to find rich solutions for not currently binding scientific, social, or entrepreneurial problems; while many institutions and enterprises have been hampered by many challenging problems at the time. However, university-based (or research-based) hospitals and dental clinics (as well as the faculties of Agriculture and a few similar research-intensive institutions) are exceptions. The flow of patients into hospitals and clinics with problems require offering effective and timely solutions, which is a testimony to the effectiveness of their problem-solving potency in such institutions. For example, cancer patients do not have much time and cannot wait for too long for a solution to emerge. The entrepreneurially oriented universities seem to have adopted a page from the operating books of the university-based clinics and hospitals. The problem-solving orientation of the university-based clinics and hospital merits a university-wide adoption.

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Title: Early strategic heritage: The carryover effect on entrepreneurial firm’s life cycle
Author: Hamid Etemad
Publication date: 19-12-2018
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Journal of International Entrepreneurship / Issue 4/2018
Print ISSN: 1570-7385
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7349
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10843-018-0240-9

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