Co-localización e internacionalización: ¿fomentan sistemáticamente las redes locales el fenómeno born global?

Abstract

The development of collaborative relationships is essential for the success of foreign operations. Although successive research has achieved a detailed description of the structures of international networks and their role in entering new foreign markets, limitations in different areas or specific phenomena offer multiple research opportunities. One of these phenomena is the acceleration of the internationalization process or the creation of Born Globals (BG). Through their relationships with different international actors, new companies acquire the necessary knowledge to mitigate the effects of barriers and grow immediately in the international sphere. Although theoretical proposals and empirical evidence coincide in pointing out the positive effects of integration into local networks made up of actors with international activities, there are open debates about the typology, when and how local relationships favor the early internationalization of companies. . This positive effect has been shown to be especially relevant in contexts such as industrial clusters, where geographical proximity allows for spill-over effects and better access to specific knowledge. According to this, using a multi-sector sample of 138 companies, our work aims to shed light on the complexity of the impact of local networks on the BG phenomenon. Combining proposals from network, internationalization and cluster theories, our work shows that the effect of networks differs depending on their typology and intensity. Likewise, a significant difference has been obtained in the effect of network membership on the international character of a company (Born Global vs Gradual).