FAST BREAKING PAPERS

Why do you think your paper is highly cited?

Essentially this article deals with a research topic which has received increasing attention from several researchers in the fields of international business, international marketing, and international entrepreneurship during the past several years. Actually, early internationalizing firms are usually described as a frontier research issue within any of these highly interrelated fields of scientific research.

Accordingly, researchers focusing on any of these fields or, more concretely, at the intersection of these disciplines, might have found this paper of special interest, particularly in the sense that it provides a quite exhaustive, updated, and critical literature review regarding this emerging phenomenon—usually labeled as "born globals" or "international new ventures"—firms that implement a global strategy from inception, and which, at the point in time when it was published, had not been readily available elsewhere.

Does it describe a new discovery, methodology, or synthesis of knowledge?

Rather than discovering a new phenomenon (some researchers identify this born global behavior earlier than the ’90s, though usually considered as an anomaly regarding the empirical verification of the gradualist approach—the so-called Internationalization Process Model or Uppsala Model), the paper manifests the rise in number of these type of early and rapid internationalizing firms (as well as of the related conceptual and empirical research focused on this phenomenon) during the last decade.

We make use of a very detailed research methodology for both selecting and analyzing the most relevant literature available in the field—at least until 2003—thus providing a synthesis of what we know, along with what we don’t know, about early internationalizing firms, in order to help future researchers to initiate research activities in this area and/or improve current research efforts conducted so far.

Would you summarize the significance of your paper in layman’s terms?

It hopefully contributes to the diffusion of scientific knowledge regarding the emerging phenomenon of early internationalization by means of a deep characterization and critical analysis of research objectives conducted so far, theoretical frameworks of reference being most commonly applied, methodological issues, and the main findings and conclusions found by the most relevant scientific literature existing in the area.

Actually, we seek to elucidate not only the most relevant benefits and contributions, but also the potential drawbacks and discrepancies, as found in the research activities conducted to date. In addition, a new resource-based model of early internationalizing firms is anticipated which will hopefully address future research on this issue.

How did you become involved in this research, and were there any problems along the way?

One of the co-authors can be considered a pioneer in this area of research, mostly from the international marketing field. At the time of considering our potential contribution, we came up with evidence that, although this area of research had increased dramatically from different perspectives beyond only international marketing—also international business/management and increasingly from entrepreneurship research—no systematic review and research agenda for the future had been provided yet from all these different angles and, accordingly, the existing literature on the issue was highly fragmented, dispersed, and heterogeneous.

Then, we thought that a systematic and multidisciplinary-oriented literature review and analysis was indeed needed to organize more exhaustively this research field and promote and facilitate better and more integrated research efforts further along. As regards problems in developing this study, it was very critical to select the most relevant scientific literature in order to develop the most elaborate picture of this state-of-the art. Thus, we had to deal heavily with selection criteria and also to undertake a search of both manual and electronic sources of knowledge.

Where do you see your research leading in the future?

We are very much interested in contributing to the development of the international entrepreneurship field as a multidisciplinary scientific discipline and born-globals constitute the type of firms that fit perfectly into the scientific domain of this emerging and still not well-established discipline, in which entrepreneurship and internationalization become the two most relevant aspects.

In addition, the combination of qualitative and quantitative research techniques and conceptual frameworks or paradigms which emerged in different research programs regarding these firms, seem to be the only way to contribute to a significant increase of knowledge in this area.

Do you foresee any social or political implications for your research?

Socio-political implications of our research have mostly to do with the desirable creation and development of new firms displaying an international and entrepreneurial condition from their establishment as well as with the support programs to be developed by public and/or private agencies in charge of promoting entrepreneurship and internationalization of the firms under their areas of economic influence.

Such programs cannot be designed in a rather generic way, but have to take into account particular characteristics shown by these firms (usually highly technological and marketing-oriented) in order to define more tailored programs which cover their specific needs in terms of external resources.

Alex Rialp Criado, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Business Economics
Autonomous University of Barcelona
Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain

Josep Rialp Criado, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Business Economics
Autonomous University of Barcelona
Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain

Gary A. Knight, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Marketing
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL, USA