Business experience: An asset or a liability to the entry on new mid-end markets?

Beskrivning

Swedish firms owe much of their success to their expansion into foreign markets. However, the global landscape has changed and new emerging markets are becoming important. In this project, we focus on new and important Mid-end market segments, which have unique attributes and pose challenges and opportunities for Swedish multinational companies (MNCs). This trend offers opportunities for advancing our theories on internationalization processes, which lay great emphasis on the importance of experiential knowledge. In this regard, experience is often conceived of as an organizational-level factor and seen as an intangible asset helping firms while they internationalize. However, idiosyncratic characteristics of mid-end markets bring up the possibility that (1) individual, rather than organizational, experience is central in international expansion strategies and that, (2) past experience may become an obsolete liability.

By focusing on important mid-end markets in emerging economies, this project put these two possibilities under careful and systematic scrutiny. We conduct in-depth case studies to obtain nuanced and rich insights into Swedish MNCs’ entry into mid-end markets in China and India. We also collect a large set of data to test the role of prior experience on MNCs’ internationalization behavior. Accordingly, we contribute to both theory and practice by asking novel research questions and answering them in an increasingly relevant and important research context.