Exporting as an Innovative Behaviour: An Empirical Investigation

Examines the characteristics of firms which undertake exporting under their own volition and in the absence of external stimuli. In this context, internally‐induced export initiation is viewed as an innovative behaviour. The classification scheme employed in this study has a high degree of internal and discriminant validity with successful classification of 86 per cent of innovative firms by the resultant discriminant model. The findings indicate that innovative firms do not vary significantly with regard to general firm characteristics from other exporters, but that they do vary significantly with regard to critical export‐related activities. Innovative firms consider exporting an ongoing activity, have greater export proportion of sales and average export order size, make greater use of export information, and tend to use different sources of data from other exporting firms. In addition, they are more likely to maintain export‐specific organizations.