Björn Walliser

Export Knowledge Absorption and SMEs’ International Performance

The Absorptive Capacity (AC) perspective has generated significant scholarly interest across a large number of disciplines. Despite this interest, AC literature has aimed primarly to explain innovation on the basis of technological knowledge absorption. As a result, knowledge and information relating to an organization’s international market environment were mostly ignored, even though AC itself was first defined as a firm’s superior capacity to use information to commercial ends (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990). Especially in the case of SMEs, it is often suggested that they should better manage information and develop superior knowledge and capabilities relative to the management of foreign operations (Kuivalainen & Bell, 2004) in order to improve their international performance. This research work provides two major contributions. First, it proposes a conceptualization of the AC framework adapted to export information activities of SMEs, based on Zahra and George’s (2002) approach to the AC concept. Second, it combines insights from the AC, marketing, international business, market orientation (MO) and knowledge based view (KBV) literature to develop a framework for describing and empirically testing the processing of export information in SMEs and its impact on their international performance.

Capturing the Home Country Conditions for Exporting SMEs: Scale Development and Implications

A prevalent premise in the international strategic management literature is that country-specific institutional settings encode firms’ behavior and actions. Nonetheless, in international business research, the national settings in which companies act are typically operationalized on the basis of cultural conceptualization. Institutional theory claims that various aspects of a national environment are reflections of the institutional settings in a given country and thus provide a promising basis for the explanation of cross-national differences. Based on this approach, this research proposes a measure for institutional country profile relevant to exporting SMEs. The scale includes regulatory, cognitive, and normative dimensions and was developed based on an emic oriented study, namely 24 semi-directive interviews with French and Romanian SME managers, as well as on a complementary literature review. By means of an etic study, the scale was furthermore tested on a sample of 107 French export managers, and respectively 106 Chinese exporting SMEs from various industries.