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What happens to international new ventures beyond start-up: An exploratory study

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Abstract

Since its inception, research in international entrepreneurship has focused mainly on how and why international new ventures internationalize early on. To date, there has been hardly any research regarding the issue of continuing corporate growth in such ventures beyond their start-up phase or initial internationalization. Theoretically, we ground our study within the dynamic capabilities view of the firm and through an inductive theory building research explore how and whether international new ventures made-it beyond the start-up phase, aiming to generate early theoretical constructs to guide international entrepreneurship research in this substantive area. Grounded in data, we develop the following constructs related to made-it points: strategic experimentation, tensions in organizational gestalt, and legitimacy lies. To get to a made-it point, entrepreneurs experiment with their venture at several levels: organizational, business model, and operational. These experimentation efforts are fueled by tensions that exist in the organizational gestalt, such as ownership structure, business proposition to the market, and product development process. To legitimate themselves and their venture in the stakeholders’ eyes, entrepreneurs may tell legitimacy lies. We maintain that international new ventures do not reach a made-it point if they only manage to develop substantive capabilities to produce desired outputs at various levels within the venture but fail to create dynamic capabilities to change and reconfigure existing substantive capabilities.

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Notes

  1. For a detailed account of international entrepreneurship emergence as a field, please refer to Coviello et al. (2011).

  2. For comprehensive reviews of the emerging field of international entrepreneurship, please refer to Cesinger et al. 2012; Coombs et al. 2009; Coviello and Jones 2004; Jones et al. 2011; Keupp and Gassmann 2009; Kraus 2011; Rialp et al. 2005).

  3. For review of legitimation strategies in international business, see Turcan et al. (2012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business and Management, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Romeo V. Turcan

  2. Department of Management and International Business, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Anita Juho

Authors
  1. Romeo V. Turcan
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  2. Anita Juho
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Romeo V. Turcan.

Appendices

Appendix 1. Interview protocol

Table 1
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Appendix 2. Adapted screenshot of coding in NVivo

figure a

Appendix 3. Substantive and theoretical coding

Table 2
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Turcan, R.V., Juho, A. What happens to international new ventures beyond start-up: An exploratory study. J Int Entrep 12, 129–145 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10843-014-0124-6

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