Faculty of Business Administration

Visiting Scholar Seminar

Uncertainty and Entrepreneurial Decision-Making in SME Internationalization

Wensong Bai

Post-doc researcher at Uppsala University, Sweden

Abstract

We investigate an implicit assumption of recent research on the internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which considers that uncertainty leads to the adoption of non-predictive strategy in foreign activities. Non-predictive strategy receives this name for deemphasizing prediction efforts and other attitudes that take the environment as given. We test effects of regulatory, cultural, and business network uncertainties on non-predictive strategy adoption using data from 755 SMEs from Brazil, China, Poland, Italy, and Sweden. Our regression analysis confirms positive effects of business network uncertainty but finds negative effects for regulatory uncertainty and no influence from cultural uncertainty. It also supports home country effects affecting how these firms relate to the uncertainties in focus. Our study develops a fine-grained understanding of the role of the uncertainties in SMEs’ internationalization strategy, besides drawing theoretical and empirical distinctions between the behavior of SMEs from emerging and developed economies in their entrepreneurial internationalization.

Date: Dec 17, 2019 (Tuesday)

Time: 15:00-16:00

Venue: E22-2010

Short Biography

Wensong Bai received his PhD from Uppsala University, Sweden in 2017. Currently he is a Post-doc researcher at Uppsala University. His research interests include international entrepreneurship, returnee entrepreneurship, and high-tech ventures from emerging markets, with a focus on the speed of internationalization and performance implications. His publications on the above topics have appeared in scientific journals such as: Journal of International Marketing, International Business Review, Industrial Marketing Management, and Entrepreneurship and Regional Development. Meanwhile, he has several papers in the pipeline.