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Internationalization literature uncritically treats different networks and knowledge as having the same impact on strategy and performance. Recognizing the need to approach these concepts in a more sophisticated way and inspired by Effectuation's Bird-in-hand principle, we posit that internationalization knowledge, customer network knowledge, and supplier network knowledge influence performance while mediated by a non-predictive strategy. We combine six hypotheses in a structural model that we test on a sample of 851 SMEs from Brazil, China, Italy, Poland, and Sweden. The analysis supports the idea that non-predictive strategy mediates positive relationships between internationalization knowledge and supplier network knowledge, on the one side, and performance, on the other. The indirect relationship involving internationalization knowledge is stronger for SMEs in developed countries, but supplier network knowledge does not differ across groups. The analysis does not support the importance of customer network knowledge. We discuss theoretical and managerial implications of these findings.

In contemporary developed Western societies, structural discrimination often bars ethnic minorities from entering mainstream entrepreneurship and labor markets. Consequently, minorities engage in microentrepreneurship for economic survival and to retain their social identities. Yet despite the economic value of ethnic minority microbusinesses, little is known about the underlying forces that develop fundamental resources which shape their performance. Based on Bourdieu's forms of capital and the resource-based view of the firm, our study presents a novel culture-induced entrepreneurship model. This model explains how ethnic minority culture shapes the development of human capital resources and how these resources contribute to business performance in communities which are often characterized as "left behind." Our study challenges the dominant underdog discourse of (cultural) capital deficit among ethnic minority entrepreneurs.

We explored and found that a set of key resources, that we call human capital resources, play an important role in ethnic minority microbusinesses in an ethnic majority social and economic space. We have also found that these key resources are developed and maintained within the coethnic niche economic space shaped by coethnic cultural value systems. Building on qualitative interview data and drawing on Bourdieu's forms of capital and the resource-based view of the firm, our study presents a novel microentrepreneurship model that we call the culture-induced entrepreneurship model. Overall, our model provides insights into how ethnic minority culture informs the creation of a set of human capital resources and how these key resources contribute to business performance in regional ethnic minority microbusinesses. Our model also shows relationships between these key human capital resources.

How firms respond to institutional turbulence while entering foreign markets remains a research gap in international business today. This is especially true due to the scarcity of understanding regarding the interaction between a firm's network development and its decision-making process. We employ a historical multiple-case study method to investigate three Swedish firms and their foreign market entry into China between 1980 and 2010. Our findings show that while firms followed the incremental pathwork suggested by the Uppsala Model, their internationalization shifted from causal prediction to effectual flexibility due primarily to institutional turbulence that led them to hiatus and reorganization of interrelated network relationships. Our research makes two significant observations related to firms establishing insidership network positions that deserve future research attention: On the one hand, firms' network development is influenced by institutional turbulence, and on the other hand, firms' network position also influences further significant institutional changes by themselves.

Purpose: The authors seek to advance the understanding of small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) internationalization at the regional level and examine the role of home market institutions in this process.

Design/methodology/approach: The authors analyze hypotheses with data from SMEs in five country markets and from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. A cluster analysis establishes the regional diversification patterns (based on regional diversification scope, speed and rhythm) and a multinomial regression tests the effect of home market institutions on their adoption.

Findings: The results offer a refined picture of SME regional diversification by revealing three patterns: intra-regionally focused firms, late inter-region diversifiers and early inter-region diversifiers. They also suggest that the adoption of these patterns is determined by SMEs' home market institutions.

Originality/value: The authors develop a nuanced understanding of SME internationalization by building upon and expanding the regionalization rationale in the internationalization patterns literature. Additionally, the authors address the acknowledged, yet rarely investigated, country-level determinants of internationalization patterns.

The possibility that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) mix and match prediction and non-prediction while making decisions during internationalization remains a highly unaddressed scenario. The rare studies considering it do not go beyond domestic effects when contextualizing the decisions that guide SMEs' foreign expansion. This study links SMEs' decision-making strategies to performance and suggests that such a relationship is moderated by the host market's institutional development and the associated institutional voids. The analysis combines primary survey data from 851 SMEs in Brazil, China, Italy, Poland, and Sweden with secondary data retrieved from the World Bank. Besides supporting both independent and synergistic performance effects of predictive and non-predictive strategies, the results indicate that foreign market institutions affect these effects differently and suggest firm size effects worth consideration. Contributions include the expansion of the debate on the relationship between prediction and non-prediction beyond the either-or reasoning that prevails in existing research and the contextualization of SMEs' decision-making strategies in terms of the institutional dynamics that SMEs encounter abroad.

Relatively little is known about how born-global companies (BGs) innovate abroad during their lifecycle or about how the international innovation activities of BGs are related to their social capital. The network concepts of relational, structural, and cognitive social capital are almost completely neglected in the international business literature on BGs’ innovation activities according to a dynamic approach. The aim of this research is to study the direct and indirect effects of structural, cognitive and relational social capital on BGs’ product innovation by including the mediating role of market and technological knowledge acquisition. We develop a set of hypotheses that we combine and test in a structural equation model. We provide results with theoretical and practical implications for BGs in terms of both social capital and innovation abroad.

Market entry performance is critical during internationalisation; prevailing views suggest that firms need to carefully plan their entry before putting the plan into action. This article focuses on three attributes affecting the possibility and usefulness of making a pre-planned market entry: unpredictability, improvisation and business network commitment. We develop six hypotheses tested on a sample of 250 entries; our main finding is that improvisation plays a mediating role in relation to performance in unpredictable markets. The analysis reveals that the relationship between unpredictability and network commitment is not significant, while the effect of unpredictability on market entry performance is negative. These findings suggest implications for internationalisation and international entrepreneurship theory. For managers and entrepreneurs, we show that unpredictability weakens market entry performance, a negative effect that can be mitigated if the entrant firm improvises.

Digital platforms have been developing fast which transform the benefits and costs of rapid internationalization of firms on them. Employing transaction cost economics perspective, we argue that the transaction attributes of asset specificity, transaction uncertainty, and transaction frequency, have all changed fundamentally in digital platform-based transactions. They render the organizational learning in rapid Internet exporting to counterbalance the diseconomies of time compression caused by the lack of organizational absorptive capacity. By using the three attributes as underlying mechanisms, we hypothesize that the expansion speed of exporters on digital platforms reduces exit hazards of the exporters. We further hypothesize that digital signals on product quality strengthen the main effect. As for digital infrastructure, we recognize its competing effects and make curvilinear moderating hypotheses. Survival analyses based on 353,636 entries of real transaction records from a digital exporting platform have provided robust findings. This study highlights the importance of examining how the digital platform reshapes the transaction attributes and internationalization-performance relationship.

Business researchers and policymakers frequently overlook ethnic minority microbusinesses. Yet, together with small and medium-sized organizations, microbusinesses drive both local and national economies. Combining social capital theory with the resource-based view and building upon 43 in-depth interviews, this study proposes a model of 'compassionate customer service'. In ethnic minority microbusinesses, coethnic culturally sensitive customer service is an important strategic resource for sustainable success, which high street chains lack. A key challenge for ongoing business survival and success is to ensure that future ethnic minority generations sustain coethnic compassionate customer service.