Serial entrepreneurship and born-global new-ventures. A case

During the last decade in a lot of different countries a new type of firms - Born Globals firms (BGs) or International New Ventures (INVs) - have emerged in opposition to the traditional view of internationalization. BGs address the internationalization issue at the early stage, targeting foreign markets since inception. This model has been increasingly attracting the attention of international business researchers (Jolly et al. 1991; Oviatt et al. 1991; Knight & Cavusgil 1996; Madsen & Servais 1997; Autio et al. 2000; Knight & Cavusgil 2005). Even if the born global phenomenon has been studied according to different perspectives of analysis, the lack of a clear conceptualization of BGs makes it difficult to perform a valid comparative empirical research (Rialp et al., 2005), since earlier research emphasized only the importance of understanding the internationalisation process and the evolution of BGs over time (Jones, Coviello, 2005). In this paper, we prefer to follow an international entrepreneurship (IE) approach in discussing the topic concerning born global firms (Acs, Dana, Jones, 2003). The development of IE as a field of research is likely to be particularly challenging both theoretically and methodologically due to its inherent complexity, since it demands a difficult integration of perspectives from international business literature and entrepreneurship theory, both of which are already strongly multidisciplinary. In fact, while the majority of empirical studies on international entrepreneurship are conducted in mature, low-tech industries with low entry barriers (Rarep, 2005), born global firms are normally conceptualized as small and technology oriented companies (Rialp et al., 2005). Moreover, as shown in a lot of recent studies (Coviello, Jones, 2004; Harris, Wheeler, 2004) the McDougall and Oviatt’s (2000) definition of IE is not specific to small new firms at early stages in the internationalization process, but rather it enables research emphasis to be placed on the international activities of all firms, regardless of age, size or industrial sector. At the same time, in the IE field, several authors (Shane, Venkataraman, 2000; Zahra et al., 1999) have noted both the scarcity of holistic and multidisciplinary theoretical approaches to born global phenomenon and the absence of an international business theory able to fully explain the development of international entrepreneurship. While entrepreneur and entrepreneurial behaviour is the common denominator of born global research, however the individual entrepreneur is not studied in depth (Andersson and Evangelista, 2006). This paper aims to explain the phenomenon of born global start-ups focusing on the natural born entrepreneur. In this way, the lack of a durable previous international experience of born global start-ups doesn’t exclude that this process of learning may occur at the individual level. Thus, in this paper we specifically focus on (individual) habitual entrepreneurs so to empirically verify if habitual entrepreneurs possess some peculiar competences able to assure to the start-ups that they establish a consolidated multinational presence. In other words, our interest for born natural entrepreneur allows us to analyse the born global start-up as a stage in the learning process of entrepreneur. The research objective is to investigate this research problem at one specific entrepreneurial context and, based on the findings, develop a potential interpretative framework for testing at subsequent contexts of analysis. More in detail, this paper reports on findings of a detailed longitudinal study at one born multinational start-up, Funambol, founded by an habitual entrepreneur.