آغاز بین المللی سازی شرکت های کوچک و متوسط​ : نقش فعال و ارتباطی

This study analyzes how exporters begin their internationalization leveraging information collected through interviews with 109 Chinese textile manufacturers. It examines whether firms that found their first international clients through a “proactive” search are likely to export faster, more intensively, and to a larger number of markets. The findings illustrate that the proactiveness of the search for the first client in a foreign market is an important predictor of the intensity and geographic scope of the firm's internationalization path but not of its speed. They support the view of internationalization as an actively pursued entrepreneurial process, which may also be affected by serendipitous events. This study provides new evidence on the first international business discovery of Chinese exporters, contributing to the literature on international entrepreneurship, international new ventures and the network approach to internationalization.

One of the highly debated aspects of international entrepreneurship is the importance of having a proactive attitude towards the discovery of international business opportunities (Amal and Freitag Filho, 2010, Dimitratos and Jones, 2005, Jones et al., 2011, Kiss et al., 2013, Kontinen and Ojala, 2012, Naudé and Rossouw, 2010 and Zhang et al., 2009). Some scholars argue that the search for international business opportunities is an active cognitive process (Kiss et al., 2013 and McDougall and Oviatt, 2000). Other scholars point that entrepreneurs can also react to opportunities that they did not actively search (Zahra et al., 2005, Liu et al., 2008 and Amal and Freitag Filho, 2010). This study contributes to the literature on international business and international entrepreneurship by analyzing whether proactiveness in the search for the first international business opportunity affects three dimensions of internationalization performance: its speed, intensity and geographic scope (Oviatt & McDougall, 1994). A large body of empirical evidence illustrates the importance of networks as entrepreneurial resources (Jacks, 2008), though their use in internationalization remains a somewhat controversial issue (Li et al., 2008 and Solberg and Durrieu, 2006). We contribute to the literature by examining the mechanisms through which Chinese entrepreneurs searched for and found their first international client (Ellis and Pecotich, 2001, Evers and Knight, 2008, McDougall and Oviatt, 2000 and Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). We analyze whether the first international business opportunities generated through networks differ from those generated through other mechanisms in terms of their effect on the subsequent internationalization of the firm, in particular the percentage of total sales targeted to foreign markets, the time elapsed between foundation and the first international sale, and the number of markets it exports to.1 Responding to calls for more research on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) based in emerging markets, low technology exporters, and the inception of internationalization (Autio et al., 2011, Coviello, 2006, Coviello and Jones, 2004, Filatotchev et al., 2011 and Madsen and Servais, 1997), we examine the first export of Chinese textile SMEs. We test a set of hypotheses about international business opportunity discovery and the importance of a proactive search on SMEs based in Guangdong, a region whose outstanding economic performance has been driven precisely by a wealth of globally competitive manufacturing exporters (Thoburn, 2010). The next section discusses the literature on international business opportunity recognition and networks, explaining why it is important to gather more empirical evidence on the process through which firms begin to internationalize. The following section outlines the data collection strategy and describes the sample of firms used in the study. The final sections discuss the findings, highlighting their implications for international entrepreneurship and suggesting future research avenues.

This research contributes to the study of internationalization of Chinese low technology SMEs by shedding light on its inception — perhaps the most entrepreneurial phase, and yet a phase that is still under-represented in the literature. Our analysis contributes to the theory of international entrepreneurship by linking the study of the first international business opportunity discovery with the study of the firm's subsequent internationalization speed, intensity and scope (Javalgi & Todd, 2011). It provides evidence of the importance of an active search for the first international business opportunity, which we found to be associated with firms that export a higher share of their output and to a larger number of countries. Proactiveness is likely to reflect entrepreneurial commitment and attitude to internationalization, which may determine whether the firm will continue to pursue an international orientation after having found the first client in a foreign market. This supports the view of internationalization as a strategically and actively pursued process (Beamish et al., 1999, Johanson and Vahlne, 2009 and McDougall and Oviatt, 2000). Managerial international experience had an effect on the internationalization process — proactiveness was associated with more experienced managers. This is in line with the arguments of the international entrepreneurship literature — internationalization is an entrepreneurial act involving people, whose skills affect the outcome (Coviello, 2006 and Shane, 2000). The managerial implication is that hiring sales managers with higher international experience may help the firm in finding new clients and penetrating new markets. It is important to take into account that, as Lu and Beamish (2006) show, internationalization does not necessarily have positive effects on SMEs' profits and revenues. The proactiveness of the first search for international clients was not associated with internationalization speed. The implications are important for the theory of international new ventures and born globals (Knight and Cavusgil, 2004 and Madsen and Servais, 1997). Companies that internationalize proactively are likely to become more successful internationalizers in terms of intensity and scope, but they may take longer than others to find their first client abroad. This suggests that some caution should be taken when using internationalization speed as a construct measuring a firm's internationalization performance. An interesting avenue for further research would be to analyze the relationships between proactiveness and the speed of internationalization in a more diversified sample of firms, including companies operating in other sectors and countries. We found that managers' international experience was not associated with the use of networks. Our study provides some new empirical evidence on the export patterns of Chinese textile firms, pointing to the need to further clarify the sectors, markets and circumstances in which networks generate superior performance, following the work of, among others, Luk et al. (2008), Li et al. (2008) and Luo and Hassan (2009). One of the limitations of our analysis is that it is based on a relatively small sample of textile exporters from only one region in China, which reduces the scope for further generalization. Another limitation of this study is that it focuses on the first international sale that was completed. It does not provide detailed qualitative information about the antecedents of proactiveness. It would be useful to enquire further into the determinants and nature of proactiveness, for example by collecting more qualitative information about the process that sparks the active search for clients in new markets, and the specific characteristics that may lead managers to have a more “proactive” attitude, other than their experience (Shepherd and De Tienne, 2005 and Zahra et al., 2005). It is worth noting that proactiveness, as all measures of entrepreneurial behavior based on self perception, may suffer from response bias. It would be interesting to expand the scope of the analysis to failed searches for international business opportunities, as opposed to focusing only on the searches that led to an international sale. Further studies on proactiveness would contribute to development of the theory of international entrepreneurship, the inception of internationalization and the network approach.