Paul Pickering

Internationalisation of the Micro-enterprise: How Tiny Businesses Can Succeed Internationally by Leveraging Their Value Chain Relationships Paul Pickering

It seems common wisdom that in order for a business to succeed internationally it should first have reached a certain size, resource base, and a high level of domestic market intensity. However, this book provides in-depth acounts of seven innovative micro-enterprises that chose to bypass these steps, attaining remarkable overseas success despite severe knowledge and resource constraints. It demonstrates to managers how the most diminutive of enterprise forms can penetrate the foreign market through nurturing and leveraging key relationships in their value chain. More importantly, the detailed longitudinal retrospections of each micro-enterprise reveal that those adopting a social exchange (trust based) instead of a transaction cost (contracts based) approach to relationship development attain better international outcomes overall. It should also serve to remind policy makers and public funding agencies alike of how worthy of support some micro-enterprises are. In fact, given that they make up around 90% of businesses in most industrialised economies, their importance to economic development should not be overlooked.