Verbeke, AlainFariborzi, Hadi2018-07-312018-07-312018-07-27http://hdl.handle.net/1880/107532Internationalization of firms in the early years after their start-up is a phenomenon on the rise. Scholarly work on these early internationalizing firms have made significant contributions to our understanding about the antecedents to their emergence, the process of their formation and operation, and their performance outcomes. There are, however, important gaps in our understanding about these firms due to inconsistency in findings of past research and lack of cohesive, integrative and theory-driven studies. This dissertation is an attempt to fill these gaps by integrating findings of past research and exploring processes and outcomes seldom analyzed before. The meta-analysis structural equation modelling in Chapter 2 integrates findings of past empirical research and finds support for an explanatory framework consistent with mainstream international business theories. The analysis in Chapter 3 showed that firms rely on balancing the slack in their human resources across alternative growth paths, whereby lower levels of slack motivate international product development while higher levels of slack stimulate international expansion. Lastly, the survival analysis in Chapter 4 shows that when the preparedness of firms based on their firm-specific advantages to enter international markets is accounted for, young ventures with an international presence have a higher survival rate compared with their domestic counterparts. Despite limitations, the totality of these findings have important contributions to our understanding of early internationalization. They show that mainstream international business theories can be used to explain the case of early internationalizing firms. This theoretical framework can be supplemented, rather than supplanted, by findings of empirical research on early internationalization. This dissertations also provides details about growth decisions of young firms explaining a choice of international expansion as opposed to alternative growth paths, and offers insights about the performance outcomes and survival effects of early internationalization. The findings of these manuscript cast new light on the significant role of firm-specific advantages at the individual- and firm-level in the internationalization process of entrepreneurial firms. Besides they suggest there might be boundary conditions to a widely accepted concept in international entrepreneurship, the learning advantages of newness that can be further explored in future research.engUniversity of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.Early internationalizationInternational BusinessEntrepreneurshipFirm-specific AdvantagesInternational EntrepreneurshipBusiness Administration--Managementdoctoral thesis10.11575/PRISM/32713