Development of International Entrepreneurial Opportunities by South African Early and Rapidly Internationalizing Small Firms

Recent theory development within small firm internationalization emerges from a group of firms whose internationalization behavior has been said to differ considerably from that of traditional firms (McDougall and Oviatt, 2000; McDougall, Shane, and Oviatt, 1994). These firms have been addressed using different titles, some of these being: ‘born globals’ (Knight and Cavusgil, 2004; Madsen and Servais, 1997; Rasmussan, Madsen, and Evangelista, 2001; Rennie, 1993), ‘international new ventures (INVs)’ (McDougall, Shane, and Oviatt, 1994; Oviatt and McDougall, 2005a), ‘technology based start-ups’ (Autio, Yli-Renko, and Salonen, 1997), ‘global start-ups’ (Oviatt and McDougall, 1994), ‘international entrepreneurs’ (Jones and Coviello, 2005), and ‘micro-multinationals’ (Ibeh et al., 2004). These firms have been found to have a common set of core characteristics, which differentiate them from traditional firms: some of them start international operations before or simultaneously with domestic operations (McDougall, Shane, and Oviatt, 1994; Rennie, 1993), and they have accelerated growth within global markets and develop visions and missions from inception based mainly on global markets and customers (Luostarinen and Gabrielsson, 2002). Where traditional small firms have internationalized by way of a predetermined, gradual sequential pattern of internationalization (Johanson and Wiedersheim-Paul, 1975), these firms have been found to exhibit an array of internationalization patterns.