Towards an emerging evolutionary life-cycle theory of internationalized entrepreneurial firms: from born globals to borderless firms?

Excerpt

More than two decades ago, a newly emerging configuration with a different pattern of internationalization in organizations such as international new ventures (INVs) was introduced. Over the past two decades, these organizations have introduced novel strategies of their own, have learned from others before them, and responded to competitors in order to survive, grow and evolve. This passage of time has established certain evolutionary trajectories, which allows us to ask why did such initially feeble institutions have survived the intense global competition, and more importantly, how have they evolved? The over-ridding theme of this issue of the Journal is, therefore, a foray into the reasons for persistence and the evolutionary pattern of institutions such as INVs, Born Globals (Knight and Cavusgil 2004) and other entrepreneurial organizations that need to compete, locally and internationally, with large and powerful organizations with highly competitive positions and wide global reach, such as multinational enterprises (MNEs) and large international trading companies (ITCs), amongst others. A few other underlying themes are also common in the four articles appearing in this issue discussing developmental aspects of entrepreneurial internationalization (EI). However, we start with the two questions raised earlier: why and how have the institutional agents of international entrepreneurship persisted and evolved? …