Is internationalization at inception only due to a time compression effect or significant differences exist and allow International new ventures to speed up their internationalization process ?

Details

Supervisors

Falize, Marine ; Coeurderoy, Régis

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

Since the 90’s, a high amount of studies are trying to know which are the main factors that enable some firms, called International new ventures, to accelerate their internationalization process compared to more “traditional” firms. Those traditional firms tend to follow a more gradual internationalization path as described in the Uppsala model. The objective of this thesis is to assess theoretically and empirically whether internationalization at inception is only due to a time compression effect or if there is significant differences between International new ventures and the firms that follow a gradual internationalization (regarding their structure, environment and composition of their workforces e.g.). To do so, we based our research on the EFIGE dataset, which is a firm-level database of representative samples 14759 firms (with a lower threshold of 10 employees) across European countries. In this database, we tested our model that hypothesized that the rapidity of the internationalization process of a firm was positively impacted by internal factors (product innovation and quality, research and development activities and the international experience of the managers) and external factors (the intensity of the competition and the sector in which the firm evolves). After a logistic regression, all the variables we tested seemed to have a positive impact on the speed of internationalization. Furthermore, our model successfully identified 78,5% of firms as traditional firms or international new ventures. This means that there is a significant difference between international new ventures and the traditional firms and not only a compression of time. This is an attempt, after all the hypothesis we read in multiple articles for our literature review, to create an integrative model regrouping all the factors that were plausible to have a positive impact on the speed of internationalization of international new ventures.