The Importance Of Internationalization In Business

INTRODUCTION
The internationalization patterns of the 1970s and earlier, when firms entered neighboring countries (Johanson and Wiedersheim-Paul, 1975; Johanson and Mattson, 1985) by repeating the value chain in each country (Barkema and Drogendijk, 2007), have changed. The Uppsala model (Johanson and Vahlne, 1990) recommends firms to internationalize in small incremental steps in their local foreign environments, however on the other side of the spectrum the emerging entrepreneurial "born global" firms, are going international at an early age (Autio, Sapienza, & Almeida, 2000). This change has gained considerable research interest (Autio et al., 2000) and transfigured the way researchers thought about the internationalization process of the firms by investigating the phenomenon of early and rapid internationalization (Zhou & Wu, 2014). Exploitation is characterized by reducing risks of foreign expansion and therefore small, incremental steps need to be taken, whilst exploration implies more risk of current expansions (Barkema and Drogendijk, 2007). The entrepreneurial ‘born global’ firms take large steps instead of small, incremental steps and are seeking to become global players in their industries and internationalize and learn faster than their competitors in search of global dominance (Barkema, Baum and Mannix, 2002). Barkema and Drogendijk (2007) argue that companies that are too risk-averse may win the battle (i.e. develop a successful expansion) but lose the war.