Key International Strategic Decisions For Smes

Although there has been a growing recognition of the importance of the key strategic decisions during SMEs internationalisation process, scholars have tended to ignore why firms change their strategy and why a new strategy is chosen. This research tried to fill this gap by giving a rich insight into changes that occur in internationalisation strategies after the first foreign market entry. The Study was built up on the integration of the Network Theories and the International Entrepreneurship, since the adoption of a mere network perspective did not allow to analyze how the entrepreneur characteristics and decisions affect the international expansion and strategy. The research methodology was pluralistic, since it embraced both a qualitative and a quantitative method, in order to generate an improved understanding of SMEs internationalisation process. Reflecting upon the findings of both stages, the research provided a valuable contribution to the knowledge of SMEs' internationalisation, showing the importance of analyzing when a firm decides to change its markets or its entry mode, along a continuum of reactive versus proactive changes.