An Empirical Investigation of the Role of Industry Factors in the Internationalization Patterns of Firms

Research on companies’ internationalization has mainly focused on firm-level and country-level factors in order to explain firms’ cross-border activities. With the exception of a limited number of studies emphasizing rivalistic behavior in oligopolistic industries, industry factors have been neglected as potential determinants of companies’ internationalization. We argue that differences across industries with regard to competition level, research intensity, tangibility of the products, and the existence of clusters should influence the impetus and opportunities to internationalize. This study examines the role of such factors using data covering the internationalization patterns of the 100 largest non-financial Norwegian companies over the period 1990 to 2000. We find that industry factors contribute significantly to explaining the internationalization of these companies, and that the effects of industry factors remain strong when firm-level characteristics are taken into account. Key words: Internationalization, multinational companies, industry factors, Norway JEL classification: F21, F23, L1

Impetus and Switching

We thank the anonymous reviewers, Harald Biong, and Myles Shaver for their very helpful comments, Kim Vasant Nielsen for excellent research assistance, and Vibeke Henriksen for editorial assistance. Previous versions of this paper have been presented at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, San Diego, August 1998, the 23rd EIBA Annual Conference, Stuttgart, December 1997, and in seminars at University of Vaasa, Swedish School of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Norwegian School of Management BI, and at the University of Melbourne. We thank participants at these meetings and seminars, in particular Ingmar Björkman, Andrew Delios, Carl Fey, Karin Fladmoe-Lindkvist, Mats Forsgren, Jean-Francois Hennart, Jan Johanson, Heli Korhonen, and Stephen Nicholas for their many comments and suggestions

A theoretical perspective

Internalisation theory informs us about why and when multinational enterprises (MNEs) internalise foreign operations, but has less to say about how the internalisation should be prepared and exercised when foreign market operations initially are carried out by local, outside agents. Drawing on insights from managerially-oriented literature, this paper explores the role of management in situations where the market transaction costs of using outside agents are negligible at market entry, but grow over time. A key question pertaining to this situation is: what management instruments may ensure persistent concurrence between changing pressure for internalisation in a foreign market and the effectuated internalisation of an MNE in that market? Management instruments and strategies that potentially support ‘staged internalisation’ include appropriation of the local outside agent’s financial assets (including equity) as well as non-financial assets in relation to user rights, customer relations, and value added activities

Insights for International Strategic Management

Companies’ choice of foreign operation modes (FOM) has been a core subject of international business studies basically from its beginning (Hymer, 1960 [1976]; Root, 1964). A halfcentury of research has brought us a set of established perspectives on companies’ foreign operation mode choices; the most important being the economics based approaches of internalisation and transaction cost theories (Anderson and Gatignon, 1986; Buckley and Casson, 1976; Hennart, 1982), evolutionary and resource based approaches (Andersen, 1997; Kogut and Zander, 1993; Madhok, 1997), institutional approaches (Kostova and Zaheer, 1999; Meyer and Peng, 2005), and process models based on learning and decision behaviour theories (Johanson and Vahlne, 1977, 2009)...

Into the unknown: the extent and boldness of firms’ international footprint

Research Summary Firms make footprints as they internationalize. Going beyond simple measures of firms' internationalization, we conceptualize and measure the extent of a firm's international footprint as the number of location‐mode combinations it is active in, whereas the boldness of the footprint shows how widespread (across modes and locations) firms' international activities are, compared to other firms with similar extent. Extent describes the complexity of international activities, and boldness captures the risk‐taking associated with operating in less know contexts. Consistent with a microfoundations lens on global strategy, we find that boldness correlates with managerial risk‐taking attributes, while the extent of internationalization strongly correlates with capabilities conducive to managing more complex operations. These measures offer a highly suitable tool for analyzing the relationship between internationalization and performance. Managerial Summary Traditional ways of measuring firms' international footprints do not describe well what they do globally. We develop a more nuanced and sharper view of firms' international footprints and a new way of thinking about the roles of complexity and risk‐taking in internationalization; what we call the extent and the boldness of a footprint, respectively. The new measures are potentially particularly useful for analyzing the relationship between internationalization and performance, which is at the core of what strategy research may offer to managers and business decision‐makers. The new measures are a stepping‐stone toward a better and managerially relevant understanding of global strategy decisions

Governmental goals and the international strategies of state-owned multinational enterprises: A conceptual discussion

State owned multinational enterprises (SOMNEs) have received extensive attention in recent research in international business and corporate governance, which demonstrates effects of state ownership on a range of international strategic decisions such as the degree of internationalization, foreign entry modes, and host country location choices. Such effects are explained by factors such as SOMNEs’ non-financial goals, corporate governance, and institutional pressures. However, results are mixed and context-dependent, and overall we still have an incomplete understanding of what governments aim to achieve through SOMNEs, and how these goals in turn lead to different international strategies. This conceptual article aims to explore how specific government goals may affect international strategies. We provide a more fine-grained view on SOMNE financial and non-financial goals and link them to key international strategic decisions such as the degree of internationalization, entry and establishment modes, and host country location choice. We review and extend previous literature and identify novel theoretical arguments, leading to an extensive set of propositions. We also sketch ideas for empirical studies of SOMNE objectives