The Social Capital approach to rapid internationalization among International New Ventures: The case of the accelerator Plug and Play Tech Center, USA

Details

Supervisors

Coeurderoy, Régis ; Lejeune, Christophe

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

Nowadays, we live in a world where reaching towards the international arena is not only considered as an option for some firms, but has also become a strategic necessity. For the last previous decades, internationalization models have considerably changed, as numerous new ventures have been able to start assessing the international chessboard from inception. While specific models such as the “Uppsala model” provide a framework of gradual involvement in foreign market, we have discovered new phenomena of “International New Venture” that challenges the previous model. A large number of new ventures, especially in high technology, have showed the ability to internationalize faster and often from inception. However, some liabilities still subsist and impede the internationalization process to occur rapidly for those international new ventures. These liabilities result from a lack of access to resources that mitigate the ability of these new ventures to access immediately the international level. In our thesis, we shed the light on the importance of business networks, as initiated by Johanson and Vahlne (2009), by focusing on the social capital. Social capital is “the sum of the actual and potential resources embedded within, available through, and derived from the network of relationships possessed by an individual or social unit.” (Nahapiet & Ghoshal 1998, p.243). In our study, we focus on explaining how the access to resources, conveyed by specific network of relationships, successfully mitigates these liabilities. The ultimate purpose of this thesis is to understand how the access to specific social capital can alleviate the intrinsic liabilities depicted by Cuervo-Cazura (2007). In order to do so, we developed a theoretical framework of the impact of the social capital on the speed of internationalization. We subsequently challenged this framework with a substantive qualitative case study of an accelerator located in the Silicon Valley: The Plug and Play Tech Center. Consequently, we challenged each of these theoretical liabilities with the resources available within the accelerator Plug and Play Tech Center. We eventually shared our recommendations for this specific case and we also propose suggestions for future researches on the thematic of the accelerator industry.