Premium
The influence of industrial clusters on SMEs earliness and postentry speed: Exploring the role of innovation activities
Author(s) -
Mendes Telma,
Braga Vítor,
Silva Carina,
Ratten Vanessa,
Braga Alexandra
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
thunderbird international business review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.553
H-Index - 37
eISSN - 1520-6874
pISSN - 1096-4762
DOI - 10.1002/tie.22226
Subject(s) - internationalization , extant taxon , industrial organization , business , incentive , absorptive capacity , sample (material) , empirical research , economic geography , relevance (law) , economics , international trade , market economy , political science , philosophy , chemistry , epistemology , chromatography , evolutionary biology , law , biology
Despite the existing contributions on the economic and social relevance of industrial clusters in the firms' internationalization, research on these topics is still scarce and, particularly, controversial at an empirical level. This study contributes to the extant literature on international development, proposing to explore the impact that industrial clusters and innovation activities exert in the most relevant temporal dimension of the firm's foreign expansion—internationalization speed (earliness and postentry speed). Further, this research seeks to ascertain whether the relationship between industrial clusters and internationalization speed is significantly different for low and high‐technology businesses. Based on a sample of 3,537 Portuguese firms, collected in the SABI database, the results suggest that firms belonging to industrial clusters and developing innovation activities tend to exhibit a higher postentry speed, not observing the same impact in terms of early internationalization. The findings also reveal that low‐technology firms have an additional incentive to become involved in industrial clusters, since these actions will be reflected to a greater extent in their postentry speed than those of high‐technology firms.