Internationalization in the Digital Era Investigating the role of digitalization on the internationalization of SMEs.
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2023-06-29
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en
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In this thesis, the relationship between digitalization and the likelihood of Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to internationalize is studied. In addition, the extent to which certain influences in the business environment strengthen or weaken the effects of the adoption of digital technologies on the internationalization of SMEs is explored. Through data from the GESIS Flash Eurobarometer 486, which entails roughly 15,000 SMEs from 40 different countries, a binary logistic regression analysis was performed to address the research question. The thesis found that SMEs that adopt digital technologies are enormously more likely to expand to foreign markets than their non-digitalized counterparts. Interestingly though, in contrast to expectations, the thesis discovered that the availability of firm-level skills (AFLS) weakened the impact of digitalization on the internationalization of SMEs. The moderating effect of the regulatory environment (RE) was found to be only significant when performing a robustness check, incorporating a comparable but altered indicator measuring regulatory obstacles. This suggests that digitalized SMEs are more resistant to regulatory obstacles when they strive to internationalize than non-digitalized SMEs.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen