Opportunity Discovery and Creation as a Duality: Evidence from Small Firms’ Foreign Market Entries
研究了小企业国际化过程中机会发现与创造如何相互促进，基于五家澳大利亚高科技企业的30次外国市场进入案例，发现知识、网络和能力在其中起关键作用。
Little research addresses the likely enabling character of the discovery and creation of opportunities during the internationalization of small firms or how international opportunities are found and constructed during the process of foreign market entry (FME). This article therefore studies how opportunities become connected during small firms’ FME. By incorporating the concept of duality, this article conceives of the discovery and creation of opportunity as mutually enabling rather than opposed. From this duality perspective, opportunity discovery and creation facilitate each other during internationalization processes. This case study involves five high-tech Australian firms and 30 FMEs. The findings show that knowledge, networks, and capabilities enable opportunities in the FME context. International opportunities are connected and nested in different levels of generality and specificity. The FME opportunities may be based on opportunity embeddedness, because each opportunity has implications for other opportunities. The findings lead to a model and propositions to explain the relationships between opportunity discovery and creation in FME.