The importance of the skills in business digitalization for the internationalization strategy: Evidence for Portuguese firms
Date
2020
Embargo
2020-10-01
Advisor
Coadvisor
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IATED Academy
Language
English
Alternative Title
Abstract
To meet the requirements of both national and international competition firms need to engage in a
continuous innovation process and constantly restructure their operations. Firms must find new ways
to develop a competitive advantage, which entails searching for and acquiring new skills, resources
and competences. Traditional theories of internationalization focused mainly on multinational firms,
giving less importance to entrepreneurs with their small businesses. However, the development of the
business world has been breaking all boundaries with the increasing internationalization of firms, not
dependent on their size, activity sector or geographical area of origin. It is also widely acknowledged
that organizations have suffered a large evolution at the technological level where the traditional
barriers of information and knowledge transferring have been progressively eliminated. Digital
transformation (DT), in business practice can enable significant competitive advantage. DT can also
be seen as a deep and accelerating transformation with regard to processes, activities, competences
and models, in order to take advantage of the changes and opportunities offered by the inclusion of
digital technologies into an organization.
In the literature of business internationalization, a large number of scientific studies focus on the
determinants of internationalization and more specifically, on their relationship with the success /
failure of internationalization. However, few of them analyze the entrepreneur’s perspective.
Therefore, this work aims to present a study focused on the entrepreneur’s perception about the
internationalization process of his company, more specifically, about the factors that enhanced the
company entry into foreign markets as well as the constraints found in this process. In this project,
through an empirical study from a sample of 195 Portuguese International firms, we intend to confirm if
the integration of technological innovations in business practice can enable significant competitive
advantage including in business internationalization.
Keywords
Skills, Business digitalization, Internationalization, Digital transformation
Document Type
conferenceObject
Publisher Version
Dataset
Citation
Lobo, C. A, Moreira, F., Santos-Pereira, C., & Durão, N. (2020). The importance of the skills in business digitalization for the internationalization strategy: Evidence for Portuguese firms. In Proceedings of the 14th International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED2020), Valencia, Spain, 2nd-4th Mar. 2020 (pp. 7273-7281). Disponível no Repositório UPT, http://hdl.handle.net/11328/3032
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TID
Designation
Access Type
Embargoed Access