Edinburgh Napier University

  In the new global business environment, internationalization has become a primary driving force for competition (Hitt et al. 2001). Traditionally the com-petitive landscape in international markets was the realm of large companies (McDougall and Oviatt, 2000). However, in the last 20 years, we have witnessed not only an increasing presence of small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) on the international scene, but also an emergence of broader and more differentiated international business strategies among SMEs (European Commission, 2003). The advent of the rapid internationalization phenomenon has, furthermore, confirmed that SMEs are able to overcome resource constraints and the liabilities of smallness to compete in the global arena (Zahra and George, 2002). The emergence of the rapidly internationalizing small firms has challenged the evolutionary internationalization ‘stage’ model (Johanson and Valne, 1977) and the inherent disadvantage associated with the smallness (Liesch and Knight, 1999). Furthermore, it has paved the way for International Entrepreneurship (IE), a new and emerging field of study distinguishable from the traditional International Business (IB) perspective (Dimitratos and Jones, 2005). The most commonly accepted definition of IE is that: ‘International entrepreneurship is a combination of innovative, proactive, and risk seeking behaviour that crosses national borders and is intended to create value in organizations’ (McDougall and Oviatt, 2000, p. 903)....