As globalization facilitates trade across geographical borders, more and more small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) take the opportunity to internationalize, sometimes even immediately after their start-up. To enhance our understanding of how SMEs internationalize, this dissertation investigates different means of interaction that SMEs employ in foreign business relationships to develop the experiential knowledge needed for further internationalization. The investigated interaction means are high-commitment internationalization modes, low-commitment internationalization modes, business network relationships, personal network relationships, and personal interaction. Based on qualitative, longitudinal data from eight born global SMEs in the biotech field and a questionnaire survey of 188 SMEs from various industries, results show how different groups of firms apply different interaction means to develop experiential knowledge and internationalize. In particular, the results show that differences in the backgrounds of founders and managers strongly influence the means that different groups of SMEs use when interacting with foreign business counterparts. Moreover, interaction of high quality and quantity, in the form of personal interaction, reduces uncertainties and supports the development of trust and experiential knowledge in internationalizing SMEs. Personal interaction is also shown to be an especially important interaction means for firms that develop new products or new technologies in collaboration with foreign customers. Building on these results, the dissertation contribute to the development of theory about the influence of interaction on the experiential knowledge development and internationalization of SMEs in general and rapidly internationalizing SMEs in particular.

There is an ongoing process where the free market within the European Union is expanding, partly through the incorporation of new member states, partly through the signing of association agreements with nearby countries and regions. When trade barriers are removed in different ways more companies consider an internationalization of the company. However, the procedure of the internationalization of companies is a rather new and unexplored area in the context of research. The focus of this study is therefore to examine how a few companies situated in Sweden, has proceeded while searching for knowledge during the internationalization process. Data has been collected through interviews that have been balanced with information from Internet and other sources. The tools that has been used to analyze is first and foremost the Uppsala model of the internationalization process, but common principles, emerged from studies at Södertörns Högskola, Stockholm, and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, has also been used. During the study the importance of personal contacts has come to light as well as the lack of research of the strategies of immigrant enterprises.

Abstract Since the beginning of this new century, global steel industries have gone through dramatic change. From the researches we have observed, the following major changes have taken place. Number one, the¡¥death spiral¡¦in 2001 to the¡¥volcanic eruption¡¦in 2003; steel prices appeared as V shape fluctuations. Global steelmakers¡¦ raw materials, including iron ore, coking coal, hot-rolled band, pig iron and even steel scrap, prices are constantly on the rise; Survival Success Surprise was what many people in this business were saying. The second, reflecting this late-2001 pricing catastrophe, steel mills began to adopt new behavior patterns of rationalization¢wSmall is Beautiful ¡¥. In order to survive in some cases, and to win in others, the steelmakers: a) implemented more rapid production cutbacks once steel prices started to fall; b) closed marginal facilities and c) increased M&A activity.It suddenly became an international trend to merge and merge again;and the appearance of the Acelor Mittal giant steel company, people called this the Metal Mettle Mittal phenomenon. The third was that the Flying-geese Theory and steel industries began to spread across Asia, from Eastern Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, to Northern China, and to Southern India. Asia became the world¡¦s steel industry center. Just as the book,¡mChina Shakes the World: the Rise of a Hungry Nation¡ndescribes, China has became a ¡§magnetic field¡¨ in the global steel industry. China¡¦s steel production increased rapidly and caused supply to exceed demand. The fourth is that global steel industries are now ushered in the energetic resource constraints era, and not the capital constraints anymore. Upstream mine sources are monopolized, more than 70% of global mining sources are owned by three major companies. In the future, global crude steel manufacturing bases will leave the main steel consuming countries and settle down in countries that are rich in mine resources to produce steel. The fifth is identical with what¡mThe Age of Discontinuity¡npointed out. The beginning of a Sigmoid Curve includes Modern Imperatives, Market Smart, and Future Scenarios; the discontinuity of global steel industry and major changes are hard to predict. The demand, growth, and price change models are not the same anymore. However, perhaps there will be a stable New Continuum when discontinuity comes to an end. The local structure of steel industries is also going through dramatic change; it used to resemble a giraffe, now it looks like Steven Spielberg¡¦s ET! Local upstream cannot provide enough semi-product steel, imports of 7 to 8 million tons of semi-product steel manage to keep this in balance. Midstream steel industries, especially single rolling mills flourish. Yet the sizes of downstream processing industries are small with low added value. The demand is not enough to absorb the production of midstream mills, causing midstream steel rolling mills to rely on massive exports. A small head with a big body and skinny legs is like a giraffe, which is just the case in Taiwan¡¦s steel industry. Whenever local steel market is sluggish, the prices are subject to change. Taiwan¡¦s steel is mostly localized in the Asia area, while joining the WTO, internationalization, and globalization will only make competition worse than ever. The plans for a big steel mill in Yunlin and expansion of another large steel mill in Taichung will cause them to face local production surplus problems; the head has become larger than the body, just like ET. Asia¡¦s steel is mainly consumed by China, yet China is constantly increasing production capacity, causing the Taiwan steel material export and domestic market to shrink. If political factors are added into the mix, the market will become even harder to predict. The competition of steel mills in Taiwan faces with China, India, Japan, and Korea steel mills shall prove to be a very harsh test. They made NT $45.1 billion in 2003, NT $65 billion in 2004, NT $65.1 billion in 2005, NT $47.7 billion in 2006; estimates say they will make NT $60¡ã70 billion in 2007. At least one amount of capital can be made every two years in the Steel Mill C, causing them to have a global leading profitability. Their strategic management is something we should look upon and conduct research on; this also includes their learning and application of strategic planning, their sharing and exchanging of strategic execution experiences, and their innovation or revolution in visions or goals, etc. They are considered a capital and technology intensive industry, and with adequate management systems, they have become the role model of a sustainable competitive advantage and a perpetual operation and sustainable development. High-ranking finance personnel in the government point out that anybody can make money out of the Steel Mill C. Is that really so?! Our research reveals the sustainable competitive advantage of enterprises with high profit and low growth rates, we used the Steel Mill C as an example; the only integrated steel mill in Taiwan that makes everything on its own has a very high productivity that made it become one of the worlds most competitive steel mills. They constantly maintain high productivity with low costs. Thus, their core competence is actually their sustainable competitive advantage in long-term, and not their high market share. When an enterprise develops, it should focus on increasing its profit and growth at the same time; when the profit condition is better than growth, start focusing on growth (and vice versa). According to the World-Class Steelmakers¡¦ rankings by World Steel Dynamics, we find the mill is trying to be far away from a haze of low growth by expanding capacity. To come up with the following five internationalization strategy suggestions is that we give to our steel mill subject: 1. Construct competitive powers and strategies of growth with quantity and quality of production at the same time. 2. Maneuver to enter international markets.of low cost product and high growth boom 3. Focus on strategic products and valuable international product strategies. 4. Take control of multi-national vertical integral investment mineral related strategies. 5. Come up with the positioning strategies of a perpetual operation and sustainable development. within the global steel industry value chain. Have a vision, persist on fulfilling the core values, grasp hold of core abilities, construct a competitive edge, seize chances, actively plan beforehand, and take control of the future. Choose the right time, use the right tactics, and do the right things to survive and succeed as a going concern of world class steelmaker.

This thesis studies how experiences influence the development of institutional knowledge within business relationships. It contributes to international business research by clarifying how experience develops the institutional knowledge of firms and what outcome such knowledge development has on firms’ internationalizations. The thesis identifies a need to distinguish between different types of experiences when investigating institutional knowledge development. In addition, the thesis compares different types of knowledge with institutional knowledge as to understand how firms learn to overcome cultural ignorance. The empirical setting consists of quantitative research of small- and medium sized firms. The findings show that market-specific experiences increases a firm’s institutional knowledge whereas experiences of multiple markets contribute to the firm’s perception of a greater need of institutional knowledge when conducting business with their specific partner. However, these experience effects are influenced by firms’ mode of operation (export vs. subsidiaries) in the international markets and mediated by cultural distance. Furthermore, the results show that despite the increased complexity that experiences of multiple markets lead to, such experiences increase a firm’s competence in foreign institutional environments. In addition, the findings show that firms lacking in ability to adapt their business also perceives a lack of knowledge about a country’s institutions and the customer.

Nowadays, China bus industry has stepped into a relative fast development stage. Domestic manufacturers have turned their attention to the international market. Yu-tong Bus Company, as one of the first-class and representative manufacturers in the industry, has made indubitable achievements in the international market, especially in middle and low-end market. However, for the process of internationalization, Yu-tong still needs to confront some barriers and obstacles. Particularly, for high-end market, more gaps exist which lead to the limitation of its competitive forces. In the thesis, we made the SWOT analysis about the export condition of Yu-tong according to the materials and data that we collected, combining with the relevant theories, conducting various analysis and investigations, we considered “Reverse FDI”(Reverse Foreign Direct Investment) as more appropriate and effective way for the internationalization, and revolving around the theory, we mainly concentrated on the extending of high-end market, tabled some proposals about seeking the breakthrough in the internationalization of Yu-tong Bus Company.

Internationalization is one of the most complicated elements in Small- and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) expansion. Researchers seem to agree more and more that none of the theories in this field can solely explain the dynamics of the internationalization of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises particularly small knowledge- and service-intensive firms. There are different theories and approaches toward the SMEs‘ internationalization; however there is one predictor in common among them: Firm‟s knowledge resources (Yli-Renko, Autio, & Tontti, 2002).Since the value-adding processes of firms are increasingly based on the creation and exploitation of knowledge, the natural focus of attention shifts from the control of static, firm-specific resources to the acquisition, assimilation, and exploitation of firm-specific knowledge (Bettis & Hitt, 1995; Grant, 1996; J.Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). In today‘s global competitive landscape, firms succeed not because they have control over scarce resources, but because they have the ability to gain the knowledge, learn and use this learning more efficiently than others. In comparison with big companies SMEs have relatively less resources, which make knowledge very vital for their survival and growth. (Mejri & Umemoto, 2010)There has not been much empirical research on knowledge resources and capabilities although the importance of knowledge-related process is widely acknowledged. There is a notable limitation in SME literature on influence of knowledge that can only offer limited insight into firm‘s foreign market operations. In other words, there is a gap in the literature about the different types of knowledge and their role in the internationalization process and therefor this research has set it goal to answer the aforementioned issues.This research has used qualitative approach and case study research design, and six semistructured interviews were conducted with small Swedish firms that involved in international activities. Since this is an exploratory study, the data from the six cases was quite managable. Analysis was conducted by coding the interviews and categorization of the codes. The codes were interpreted and three types of knowledge were extracted based on both the data and theories; Technological Knowledge, Business Knowledge and Market-specific Knowledge. The main characteristics of each company were put together with regard to the three types of knowledge. The next step in analysis was to find out if there were any differences or similarities between the companies when it came to internationalization process. By using the aforementioned results a farmework was developed. The framework presents the role of each Knowledge in the internationalization process and is the key finding of this research.The results from this study indicate the significant role of different types of knowledge as the main source of competitive advantage for SMEs to go to international markets. However the result of this study also designates that the role of knowledge in the internationalization process must be understood in the context of the industry, the company and the people involved.

International entrepreneurship (IE) is “a combination of innovative, proactive and risk-seeking behaviour that crosses national borders and is intended to create value in organizations”. The IE literature has been concerned with entrepreneurial behaviour in multiple countries and cross-border studies of entrepreneurship and international activities of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). Due to the potential for SMEs to serve as significant sources of export, considerable research has been conducted regarding their internationalization. However, despite attempts to integrate concrete frameworks of international entrepreneurship, some primary issues have not been adequately addressed and IE researchers are faced with challenges including insufficient micro-data for advancing quality research. The main objective of this thesis is to study and explore the limitations on researchers to access governmental data regarding small firms operating internationally and use it for scientific purposes. Despite company data being compiled and publicly available in some countries, such as Germany, other countries, including Canada, have not made any such efforts in a coherent way. There is a significant disconnect in the Canadian context between internationalization and firms’ data. This shortcoming may stem from various sources, including the legal framework in Canada for accessing data and a lack of sufficient financial support and expertise to gather and integrate such data. Furthermore, the type of data available to the research community through statistical institutions were identified and analyzed, as were access methods. With the increasing interest of researchers in accessing data gathered by the government, the formation of anonymized records or anonymized micro-datasets has acquired great importance. Therefore, the primary approach is to explore the extent to which data regarding firms’ characteristics and internationalization activities are currently available to the research community, as well as to ensure the confidentiality of official statistics, most notably in the Canadian context. The research resulted in the confirmation of data availability in Canada through government and statistical organizations. The latter bodies can provide researchers and research organizations access to some data but limitations arise in providing micro-datasets to researchers due to confidentiality issues; these constraints were identified and further analyzed. Moreover, this research has studied methods to overcome these limitations and assess the shortcomings in micro-data in order to advance quality research. Methods and recommendations were introduced and studied to allow researchers access to essential data and information while maintaining confidentiality.

Med en mer globaliserad värld och mer homogena marknader har betydelsen för marknadsanpassning på utländsk marknad blivit alltmer ifrågasatt. Vissa svenska modeföretag har olika uppfattningar angående detta där vissa anser att anpassning inte alls behövs då modet är globalt medan andra anser att anpassning är ett måste för att nå framgång på den utländska marknaden. Studien syftar till att studera i vilken mån anpassningens betydelse har i svenska modeföretags marknadsstrategi då världen blivit mer globaliserad och marknader mer homogena. För att genomföra studien har en kvalitativ studie genomgått i from av en flerfallsstudie med de svenska modeföretagen; Odd Molly, Björn Borg och Hunky Dory. Datainsamlingen har skett via semi-strukturerade intervjuer och dataanalysen har skett utifrån en transkribering. Studiens teoretiska grund utgörs av tidigare forskning som är sammanvävd i det teoretiska ramverket som utgörs av tidigare vetenskaplig forskning inom etablering, internationalisering och anpassning. Det empiriska kapitlet består av den datainsamling där respondenterna har besvarat frågor om företagets marknadsstrategier vid etablering utomlands och deras internationalisering. Till uppsatsens slutsats anpassar de samtliga tre modeföretagen delar av sin marknadsstrategi vid utlandsetablering, till den utsträckningen att de känner att de kommer att nå framgång och vara konkurrenskraftiga på marknaden. Bevarandet av deras huvudkoncept samt image är viktigt och därför bör delar av marknadsstrategin vara standardiserad på de olika utländska marknaderna. Dock är en anpassning väldigt betydelsefullt då alla marknader och kundpreferenser ser olika ut. / In a globalized world and more homogeneous markets, the importance of market adaptation to foreign market has become increasingly questioned. Some Swedish fashion companies have different opinions about this where some believe that adaptation is not needed at all when fashion is global, while others believe that adaptation is a must to achieve success in the overseas market. The study aims to examine the extent to which adaptation is important in the Swedish fashion company's marketing strategy when the world has become more globalized and markets more homogenous. To complete the study, a qualitative study has been completed in form of a multiple case study of the Swedish fashion companies; Odd Molly, Björn Borg and Hunky Dory. Data collection has occurred through semi-structured interviews and the data analysis has been based on a transcription. The study's theoretical base constitute of previous research which is interwoven in the theoretical framework consisting of previous scientific research of establishment, internationalization and adaptation. The empirical chapter consists of the data collection where respondents have answered questions about the company's marketing strategies in establishing themselves abroad and their internationalization. For the essay's conclusion all three fashion companies adapts parts of its marketing strategy when establishing abroad, to the extent that they will feel they will succeed and be competitive in the market. The maintenance of their main concepts and image is important and therefore parts of the marketing strategy should be standardized in the various foreign markets. However, adaptation is significant since there are differences in markets and customer preferences.

Summary Title of the thesis: A comparison between an Australian and a Swedish company's internationalization process, within the food sector. Seminar date: 2011-10-12 Course/subject: International marketing, master thesis 15hp Authors: Sanna Ekborg, Paulina Haglund Supervisor: Svante Andersson Keywords: Internationalization process, Swedish and Australian company within the food sector, Gourmet Garden, Örneborgs Delikatesser, market choice,entry modes, reactive/proactive behaviour. Purpose:The purpose of our study is to describean Australian and a Swedish company within the food sector, and analyze which factors affect the differences and similarities in the companies' internationalization processes. Research method: The research is qualitative and the analysis is deductive. Empirical study: Our empirical study is based on two companies, Australian Gourmet garden and swedish Örneborgs Delikatesser. Our empirical data consists of indepth interviews with the CEO, Chief Operating Officer and marketing manager. Theoretical framework: Internationalization in the food industry, the Uppsala model approach, the network approach, international entrepreneurship and internationalization through innovation. Results: Our research has showed that there are differences in the internationalization process between the two companies. Our Australian company has a more proactive approach to internationalization, while our Swedish company has a reactive approach. it may be due to their different export traditions.

With the development of economic globalization, the threat of international financial crisis is rising. In order to address the challenge of financial crisis, the regional financial cooperation is becoming important mechanism for political elite in East Asia. Although Taiwan has important status of international economics and trade in East Asia and close economic and trade relations with China, but it is still difficult for Taiwan to join East Asia financial cooperation due to Cross-Strait political factor. This thesis analyses the political consensus of political elite in East Asia through the perspective of ¡§Neo-functionalism¡¨ on the impact of two stages of East Asia financial cooperation after international financial crisis in 1997 and 2008, and on the difficulty for Taiwan to take part in regional financial cooperation of ASEAN+3 with China¡¦s increasing political and economic influence in East Asia. Therefore this thesis analyses above issues for providing advices to Taiwan government regarding policymaking on participation in East Asia financial cooperation.