eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

This thesis explores international new ventures’ growth strategies and the antecedents for such strategies. Literature review draws together relevant research and literature concerning the firm growth and the antecedents of growth. The empirical part of the thesis presents the findings of the research including analyzing the growth strategies independently and also classifying the different strategic growth strategy combinations. In addition, the relationships between the antecedents of the growth and the growth strategies are analyzed.

The area of this research is novel in the context and approach of this thesis. The thesis will map the phenomenon of international new venture growth strategies thus contributing to the accumulation of knowledge in the field of firm growth and a holistic understanding of the international new venture growth. This research will also benefit the managers and government as it provides insightful implications for both parties.

This thesis is a part of “Born Globals: Growth Stages and Survival” –project thus the research is conducted as a cooperation between Aalto University School of Economics and Vaasa University. Quantitative empirical research is conducted as an internet-based questionnaire which was sent to the Finnish international new ventures. Altogether the survey generated 202 respondents, producing a good response rate of 37,5%. The data is analyzed in the SPSS with the following statistical techniques: descriptive analysis, frequency distribution, cluster analysis and linear regression analysis.

The empirical research produced several important findings. Firstly, the international new ventures use organic growth strategy as a main vehicle for growth in addition to the partnership strategy. Also retrenchment strategy is pursued to a moderate extent but only a few international new ventures engage in the acquisitive growth strategy. Secondly, international new ventures have more strategic options to grow than a strategic stage-model would imply. Thirdly, there are several different archetypes of international new venture growth that pursue the growth strategies differently from each other basically from pursuing only the organic growth strategy to the pursuit of all of the different growth strategies. Nevertheless, the majority of the international new ventures pursue either organic growth strategy alone or a combination of the organic and partnership growth strategy. Fourthly, the importance of the networking capability was strengthened as it has a positive relationship to both organic growth and partnership growth.