International Co-Operations and Entrepreneurship Development: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Even if the need to innovate has always existed, it has been accentuated in recent years due to the acceleration of technological change and the growing world competition: entrepreneurship - meant as the individual capacity to take risk, to produce innovation and to predict and act upon change – becomes a crucial factor of firms’ competitiveness. At the same time, international alliances have been recognised, above all in emerging countries, as the best way to improve local firms’ entrepreneurship and learning capability. However strategic alliances show a high degree of failure, thus posing the need to investigate the factors that can impact on their longevity and success. According to the above considerations, the aim of our paper is to investigate: a) the linkage between national culture and entrepreneurship, b) how culture affects firms’ propensity to international co-operation.entrepreneurship; knowledge; culture; individualism vs. collectivism.

Strategie di internazionalizzazione delle imprese nell’Est Europeo: determinanti e modalità di attuazione

I Paesi dell’Est Europeo, nonostante presentino importanti differenze in termini di sviluppo e rischiosità, stanno acquisendo un’importanza crescente quale meta dei processi di espansione internazionale delle imprese italiane. Notevole è, infatti, il numero di iniziative produttive e commerciali realizzate da imprenditori italiani nell’area. Nell’Est Europeo, non sono presenti solo le imprese italiane di maggiori dimensioni, che in alcuni casi costituiscono i principali investitori esteri, ma anche molte piccole e medie imprese che ricercano, attraverso la collaborazione con gli attori locali, di ottenere vantaggi “ resource exploitation” e “knowledge exploration”. Nell’ottica delineata, sono stati analizzati i percorsi di sviluppo dei Paesi dell’area, i sistemi imprenditoriali emergenti dalla transizione, i principali fattori di rischio e di attrattività che possono condizionare le scelte di ingresso degli operatori esteri. Le argomentazioni presentate in questo lavoro sono il frutto di un percorso di ricerca pluriennale, che ha cercato, costantemente, di coniugare argomentazioni teoriche ed evidenze empiriche

Post-Bureaucratic Firms' Internationalization. A Cross-Cultural perpective

When post-bureaucratic organizations internationalize, they follow: “Hybridism”, “Cyclicity”, “Transversality”, and “Turbolence”. International post-bureaucratic firms need to learn how to manage the increasing diversity and how to pursue hybridization, without scarifying their identity, and the values, which have been crucial for firm’s competitiveness. This chapter explores the challenges connected to the internationalization of post-bureaucratic organizations, and focuses on the key role of cultural competence. When firms enter culturally distant markets, they face the opportunities and threats connected with cultural distance, and managers’ cultural competence is a key factor for the building up of cultural bridges, that is social mechanisms able to reduce the perception of the distance. Cultural bridges help firms to learn from the environment, and to pursue the final aims of their international strategy