Immigrant Entrepreneurship and Internationalization and Globalization of Successful U.S. High-Tech Start-Ups

Immigrant entrepreneurs play an important role in the U.S. high-tech sector and may advance the country’s collaborative advantage through internationalization and globalization of start-ups. This study explores whether immigrant founding of U.S. high-tech firms, conditional on survival and sustained growth, contributes to their pursuing internationalized or globalized strategies. The strategies are defined with regard to their acquisition and deployment of financial, human, and social capital across a single border (for international strategies) or multiple borders spanning geographically-dispersed and culturally-diverse countries (for globalized strategies). A set of twelve matched-firm case studies across four high-tech sectors form the main data source along with a survey sample of approximately 1300 successful high-tech firms. We find that native-founded firms in our case study group were as likely as immigrant-founded firms to pursue internationalized strategies, but the immigrant-founded firms appeared more likely to adopt such strategies earlier in their history and were more likely to set up substantial operations outside the U.S., rather than partnerships or marketing arrangements