The Influence of Collaboration on Enterprises Internationalization Process

Beatriz Andres, Raul Poler and Eduardo Guzman
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Beatriz Andres: Research Centre on Production Management and Engineering (CIGIP), Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Calle Alarcón 1, 03801 Alcoy, Spain
Raul Poler: Research Centre on Production Management and Engineering (CIGIP), Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Calle Alarcón 1, 03801 Alcoy, Spain
Eduardo Guzman: Research Centre on Production Management and Engineering (CIGIP), Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Calle Alarcón 1, 03801 Alcoy, Spain

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 5, 1-23

Abstract: At present, competitive globalized environments force enterprises to make more effort to both set up collaborative processes among networked partners and open their borders to the internationalization process. With this participation in internationalization processes, a set of barriers emerges that enterprises must overcome, particularly SMEs. The internationalization barriers are classified in four main dimensions, namely, strategy, technology, partners and product, which are considered to establish relationships between the internationalization and the collaborative processes. Accordingly, the research objective is to analyse the extent to which collaboration with international partners facilitates the internationalization process. A research survey was held with Spanish manufacturing SMEs to assess the internationalization of operations by establishing collaborative processes in global networks. Two surveys were conducted to analyse collaboration and internationalization concepts, and the influences among them: (i) a first survey, designed to validate the posed hypothesis about the relation between internationalization and setting up collaborative processes; (ii) a second survey, devised to perform a descriptive analysis that identifies less-applied collaborative processes in SMEs by establishing internationalization activities. The study results reveal that collaboration positively influences the internationalization process, and identifies the collaborative processes that are less performed among the partners that internationalize their operations.

Keywords: SMEs; internationalization; collaborative processes; collaborative networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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