The emerging new architecture in international entrepreneurship: Dynamic impacts of business models transformation favoring accelerated internationalization of smaller enterprises

This article explores the evolving impact of the behavioral, competitive, institutional, and technological forces and factors that have already influenced, and continue to influence, the architectural nature, speed and extent, and functional operations of international entrepreneurship. These evolutionary institutional and technological changes are intensifying competition, and accelerating the transformation of business models and their corresponding international operations, which are in turn stimulating the global consumers’ evolutionary behavioral change in favor of higher services and consumer-centered values (CCVs). It will be also exploring the ongoing evolutionary offline, and mainly online, developments that have already had and continue to impact internationalizing smaller enterprises (iSMEs). These developments have transformed the iSMEs’ international operations in favor of more service-oriented logic, adding value, offering higher services, speed, and extending their international reach substantially. As a result, iSMEs have been reaching much larger number of international customers and international markets at much faster than their slower predecessors (e.g., the born globals, the international new ventures, and the rapidly internationalizing enterprises) with lesser efforts and lower risks than ever before, mainly through collaborative arrangements with much larger institutions, such as the multi-sided online platforms (simply, Platforms). Consequently, iSMEs that are willing to collaborate with platforms need to evaluate the strategic cost/benefits of their transformation for reaching ever larger number of international markets through platforms to have larger and more satisfied international customers at highly accelerated internationalization through online platforms. The comparative, empirical, and theoretical analysis of this article contribute to advancing iSMEs’ accelerated internationalization benefiting from larger number of consumers and markets at lower risks, costs, and efforts through dominant platforms.