Study Of The Internationalization Of Smes Factors Influencing The Mode

Business internationalization is an inevitable trend of open market economy. Economy globalization makes business internationalization as one of the vital points in the areas of economics and management. Previous researches about business internationalization focused on large-scale enterprise especially on multinational corporations. Traditional stage theory regards the route of internationalization as a gradual process. However, in the 1990s, a new mode of internationalization occurred and attracted many researches. This kind of new phenomenon mainly occurred in the sort of Small and medium enterprises (SME). Be different from traditional stage mode, this kind of SMEs regard the global market as their target market from inception, and start up international operation rapidly. This mode of internationalization is defined as international entrepreneurship mode by researchers. The role of this new mode become more and more important, hence the research on this area is worthy and necessary.Based on the summarizing of previous theories about internationalization, this paper starts with international entrepreneurship phenomenon, reviews existing studies, summarizes the related literatures, and defined two kinds of internationalization modes including international entrepreneurship mode and gradual global mode for SMEs. Then a theoretic model of the factors which influence SME's internationalization mode and related hypothesis are presented. This model is improved according to the results of a case study. Then, a questionnaire-based empirical survey is carried out in a large sample of manufactural SMEs located in Hunan province who have developed internationalization. SPSS and LISREL are applied in the process of data analysis.According to the result of investigation and data analysis, this paper gains several conclusions and adjusts model hypotheses. In this paper, managerial global mindset, international experience, risk preference, firm international entrepreneurial orientation, area environment of network and foreign market advantage are found to be significant factors that influence internationalization mode of SMEs. All these six factors positively effect on the adoption of international entrepreneurship mode for SMEs. The former 4 factors which represent firm's internal characteristics influence the extent of inthernationalizaion mostly.The expected future work is depicted at the end of this paper.