Excerpt
The decades of 1980s and 1990s witnessed the dawn of new era in international business with the appearance of Born Globals, international new venture (INVs), and other forms of internationalizing SME (iSMEs). These breeds of enterprises differed from their predecessor institutions of the past, including the multinational enterprises (MNEs), as they deployed potent internationalization strategies in their youth, operated more agile business models, and internationalized much faster than their older and larger counterparts — i.e., the MNEs — and the received theories could not explain them well at the time (McDougall et al.
1994 and Shrader et al.
2000) and even their survival were questioned (Mudambi and Zahra
2007). More importantly, they posed new theoretical questions to, and challenges for, the received theory then. With the extensive developments in the Internet, communication and information technologies (CITs), and the Internet-based capabilities (IBCs), we seem to be witnessing enhanced competencies and capabilities (Tarafdar and Gordon
2007; Skylar Powell and Lim
2021; Sambamurthy et al.
2003). The early signs of another new era rising in the horizon — i.e., the international small digitized ventures (ISDVs) reflect the new developments (Petersen et al.
2002 and Poon and Jevons
1997). Their true emergence seems to have started with the appearance and rapid growth of multi-sided online platforms in need of increasing number of digitized suppliers, to which some SMEs aspiring to grow rapidly responded by their contribution to the supply chains (Bernhard et al.
2006) of the earlier platforms such as Alibaba.com and Amazon.com, which had relied on the Internet and Information Technology (Benitez-Amado et al.
2010; Chari et al.
2008; Dale Stoel and Muhanna
2009). Such early involvement in out-sourcing of parts, or complete products, soon led to the emergence, if not the realization of, indirect internationalization of an increasingly larger number of exporting ISDVs seeking international growth with efficient operations and globally competitive product(s) offerings (Bernard and Jensen
1999; Cadogan et al.
2005; Knight and Liesch
2002; Poon and Jevons1997). However, these newly emerging ISDVs differ from their earlier counterparts due to their heavier reliance on collaborative and digitization strategies through the use of advancing communication and information technologies (Porter
2001). We seem to be facing the dawn of new development through the increasing appearance and rapid internationalization of these small, digitized ventures (ISDVs). …
