A generation perspective on small firm internationalization: From traditional exporters and flexible specialists to born globals

This paper deals with the effects of firm age on export behavior and performance for small exporters. Using market and technology trends from the last decades, we have classified three generations of small exporters: the traditional, the flexible specialists, and the Born Globals. Building upon a sample of Norwegian exporters these three generations of exporting firms are compared using competitive advantage, manager orientation, export motives, and export strategy. The results revealed several significant distinguishing features between the generations. Important differences were the strong technological competitiveness, niche focus and widespread use of advanced communication technology in the two groups of recently established exporters compared to the older, traditional exporters. The study also showed that the various generations of firms had different export performance antecedents. Key factors for the Born Globals were found to be technological advantage and niche focus combined with strong customer orientation. Among both the other groups — traditional exporters and flexible specialists — marketing advantage, product quality, and various manager orientation factors were important performance determinants. It seems that firm behavior and performance are partly contingent upon the environmental context in existence during the firm's year of establishment, which results in systematic differences between the generations of exporting firms. As the firm's year of establishment has often been a neglected variable in international marketing research, these results suggest we should pay more attention to firm age in future studies, as both export behavior and performance determinants vary between different generations of exporting firms. This study further concludes that we can now distinguish a new generation of exporters; the Born Global firms. One of the most important characteristics of these firms is their speed of internationalization; just a few years after establishment the Born Global firms achieve considerable sales in a number of export markets.