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Born globals and international business: Evolution of a field of research

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Abstract

Knight and Cavusgil’s award-winning article has played an important role in the development of the growing body of research on companies that internationalize early and rapidly. These “born global” firms represent important contributors to many economies, often as key players in ecosystems that support large multinational enterprises. Despite their growing importance, our understanding of how and why these firms develop and implement their internationalization strategies, and what makes them successful, remains incomplete. Addressing such questions has contributed substantially to the development of the research domain of international entrepreneurship (IE), which focuses on entrepreneurial aspects of doing business across borders, in the context of both small and large firms. While IE is much broader than born globals, these firms are central to the IE domain and the impact of the Knight and Cavusgil paper has helped to develop a stronger awareness of the important linkages and intersections between IE and the wider international business research community. We reflect on the important contribution of this paper, and suggest some directions for the future development of research into firms that choose to operate internationally practically from the start of their operations.

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Figure 1

Notes

  1. It can be argued that it was the recognition of the phenomenon that was novel, rather than the phenomenon itself; the “free-standing companies,” which were established in the nineteenth century and flourished until the First World War (Wilkins, 1988), arguably qualify as born global firms. Whatever the first occurrences and origins of the phenomenon, it has become more broadly and systematically examined only over the past two decades or so.

  2. While the research on born globals and international new ventures is widely recognized as the genesis of the IE literature, the domain of IE is much broader and may even include research on established multinational firms. One of the most widely accepted definitions of IE is: “International entrepreneurship is the discovery, enactment, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities – across national borders – to create future goods and services” (Oviatt & McDougall, 2005: 540). In a review of IE research, Jones et al. (2011) presented a thematic map illustrating the ontology of the IE domain. The three major types of IE research are entrepreneurial internationalization, international comparisons of entrepreneurship, and comparative entrepreneurial internationalization. Born global research is in the first category.

  3. Although presented as two types or perspectives on early and rapidly internationalizing companies, the differences should not be over-emphasized. Traditionally, born globals have been associated with the rapid growth of revenues from sales in international markets (or, as noted by Cavusgil & Knight, 2015, in their retrospective, with companies that “view the world as their marketplace”). However, their proposed tendency to build global networks of collaborators such as distributors, representatives, and suppliers suggests they may also piece together critical operational and knowledge-based resources from international markets (see Prashantham & Floyd, 2012, for a discussion of learning in this context). In their award-winning paper, Knight and Cavusgil (2004: 124) indeed define born globals as “business organizations that, from or near their founding, seek superior IB performance from the application of knowledge-based resources to the sale of outputs in multiple countries.”

  4. We thank one of the reviewers for bringing this point to our attention.

  5. We thank Shameen Prashantham for sharing his thoughts on this issue.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Ivo Zander

  2. Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

    Patricia McDougall-Covin

  3. Otago Business School, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Elizabeth L Rose

  4. Aalto University School of Business, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

    Elizabeth L Rose

  5. lndian Institute of Management, Udaipur, India

    Elizabeth L Rose

Authors
  1. Ivo Zander
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  2. Patricia McDougall-Covin
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  3. Elizabeth L Rose
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Correspondence to Ivo Zander.

Additional information

Accepted by John Cantwell, Editor-in-Chief, 1 October 2014. This paper was single-blind reviewed.

The original Decade Award winning paper was published in the Journal of International Business Studies (2003) 34, 586–599, doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400056.

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Zander, I., McDougall-Covin, P. & L Rose, E. Born globals and international business: Evolution of a field of research. J Int Bus Stud 46, 27–35 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2014.60

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2014.60

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