Drivers Of Sustainable Growth Of International New Ventures

In the process of economic globalization, a new class of small and medium enterprises has shown up. Different from the traditional global enterprises, they allocate resources worldwide, going internationalization from the inception or shortly after that, which is also their ultimate goal. These small and medium enterprises are academically named "International New Ventures". As the number of International New Ventures increasing continuously, many scholars have found that traditional international theory can not exactly make a reasonable interpretation of the "International New Ventures Phenomenon", therefore they began to build a new theoretical framework which suits for International New Ventures to study this phenomenon.This year is the twelfth year after China joining the WTO, although the global financial crisis has slown down the growing speed of the world economy, China’s economy still grew rapidly. More and more enterprises began to go internationalization initiatively and participate in the global competition actively. International New Ventures phenomenon is becoming more and more common in China, and most of them appeared in the high-tech industry. However, as the domestic scholars rarely studied the International New Ventures, there is no integrated theoretical framework to study the drivers of the inception and sustainable growth of the International New Ventures in high-tech industry systematically until now. As the globalization trend is intensifying, more and more small and medium-sized enterprises are showing up on the international stage. In such an international environment, in order to keep the growing speed of Chinese economy and make China rank on the list of developed counties, we must build a set of theoretical framework which is suitable for Chinese enterprises to guide small and medium-sized enterprises to go internationalization and perform better in the international competition.A case study approach is used in this paper to exploratively study the drivers of the sustainable growth of International New Ventures. Firstly, by summarizing existing theories, we build an integrated framework for systematic study of the drivers of the inception and growth of International New Ventures in high-tech industry, which is based on the entrepreneurship perspective, knowledge perspective and network perspective. Then we analyze the evolution of drivers during different stages of enterprises’life cycle in a dynamic perspective. This article totally proposes six research propositions and verifies them with cross-case analysis lastly.The research result shows that:(1) Entrepreneurship, corporate knowledge and enterprise network are the main drivers of the inception and sustainable growth of International New Ventures.(2) To achieve sustainable growth, the drivers are changing with the life cycle of International New Ventures evolves. AS the enterprises transit from the start-up stage into the mature stage, the entrepreneurship transforms from individual entrepreneurship into organizational entrepreneurship; knowledge acquisition method transforms from exploratively learning into take-use learning, and then turns back to exploratively learning; enterprise network changes from informally personal network into formally organizational network.