Market Space and the New Mechanism of Internationalisation: Some Preliminary Insights

Abstract

Firms are consumers, producers, managers and distributors of information (Egelhoff, 1991; Casson, 1996), and information use is an essential element of organisational operations in order to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity about its external environment and its internal operations (Daft and Lengel, 1986). Consequently, it is not surprising that at the core of internationalisation process theory is lack of knowledge and subsequently uncertainty about markets abroad, due to a lack of location-sensitive foreign market information (Johanson and Vahlne, 1977, 1990). The internationalisation process is in essence seen as a costly experiential learning process of information and knowledge accumulation in order to gradually reduce uncertainties about markets abroad.