What Happens To International New Ventures beyond Start-up: An Exploratory Study

We ground our study within the dynamic capabilities view of the firm and through an inductive theory building research explore continued corporate growth in international new ventures beyond their start-up phase or initial internationalization or whether they actual made-it to that point (phase). This paper should be seen among the first attempts to generate early theoretical constructs to guide international entrepreneurship research in this, under-searched substantive area. Grounded in data, number of constructs emerged related to made-it point or continued corporate growth of international new ventures: strategic experimentation, tensions in organizational gestalt, and legitimacy lies. We conjecture that international new ventures do not reach a made-it point if they only manage to develop substantive capabilities to produce desired outputs at various levels within the venture, but fail to create dynamic capabilities to change and reconfigure existing substantive capabilities.