Toward a Typology of Commitment States Among Managers of Born-Global Firms: A Study of Accelerated Internationalization
Substantial scholarly work has shed much light on the development of a contemporary global environment—namely, the phenomenon of born-global firms. These young entrepreneurial firms, which take on internationalization early in their evolution, are now found in large numbers in most economies, especially in smaller, saturated, developed markets. In this article, the authors advance some theoretical explanations regarding the behavior of these firms. In the current Australian casebased study, rather than engaging in a firm-level analysis, the authors focus on the attitudinal orientations of senior management in this new breed of internationally active firms. In contrast to an incremental approach, the authors offer a theoretical explanation that integrates the network perspective and resource-based view with international entrepreneurship. Their exploration of the managerial mind-set of these smaller bornglobal firms leads to the identification of four states of commitment to accelerated internationalization by top management. Delineating these states should assist managers in achieving their accelerated internationalization objectives. Any of the four attitudinal mind-sets facilitates internationalization, but the strategist state adopts a more benevolent, collaborative behavioral stance designed to preserve key relationships. The strategist also avoids the short-term orientation, competitiveness, and self-interest of the responder, the opportunist, and the experimentalist. There are still incomplete theoretical explanations about why and how smaller companies seek to internationalize (Knight and Cavusgil 1996, 2004; Oviatt and McDougall 2005), particularly with respect to “accelerated internationalization” (Shrader, Oviatt, and McDougall 2000), which McDougall (1989) defines as the international development of new ventures that go abroad from