Internationalisation of the Micro-enterprise

ISBN-13: 9783639029772 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 372 str.

Paul Pickering

Opis

It seems common wisdom that in order for a businessto succeed internationally it should first havereached a certain size, resource base, and a highlevel of domestic market intensity. However, thisbook provides in-depth acounts of seven innovativemicro-enterprises that chose to bypass these steps,attaining remarkable overseas success despite severeknowledge and resource constraints.It demonstrates to managers how the most diminutiveof enterprise forms can penetrate the foreign marketthrough nurturing and leveraging key relationships intheir value chain. More importantly, the detailedlongitudinal retrospections of each micro-enterprisereveal that those adopting a social exchange (trustbased) instead of a transaction cost (contractsbased) approach to relationship development attainbetter international outcomes overall. It should also serve to remind policy makers andpublic funding agencies alike of how worthy ofsupport some micro-enterprises are. In fact, giventhat they make up around 90% of businesses in mostindustrialised economies, their importance toeconomic development should not be overlooked.