Rapidly with a Rifle or more Slowly with a Shotgun? Stretching the Company Boundaries of Internationalising ICT Firms

Niina Nummela (), Sami Saarenketo and Kaisu Puumalainen

Journal of International Entrepreneurship, 2004, vol. 2, issue 4, 275-288

Abstract: Small firms start operating internationally much more quickly than was previously the case. However, this requires that companies acquire resources and skills in a significantly shorter time than earlier. This paper discusses the pressures that such development puts on company boundaries from the viewpoint of Finnish ICT companies. Our findings indicate that the rapidity of internationalisation is positively correlated with the number of foreign partners but reverse to our expectations, i.e., the more partners the firm has, the slower its start of international operations. Additionally, the study confirmed that a rapidly internationalising firm has a narrowly defined core competence. Surprisingly, rapidly internationalising firms searched for partners with similar type of competence instead of complementary one. This indicates that the associations between core competence and rapid internationalisation deserves more attention. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2004

Keywords: core competence; rapid internationalisation; boundaries; partnership; ICT (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10843-004-0042-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jinten:v:2:y:2004:i:4:p:275-288

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ip/journal/10843/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10843-004-0042-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Entrepreneurship is currently edited by Hamid Etemad

More articles in Journal of International Entrepreneurship from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().