Title: What encourages the Indian family small and medium enterprises to internationalise?

Authors: Arpan Anand; Navdeep Kaur

Addresses: University Business School (UBS), Panjab University (P.U.), Chandigarh, Punjab, India; Jaipuria Institute of Management, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India ' University Business School (UBS), Panjab University (P.U.), Chandigarh, Punjab, India

Abstract: The current study tries to discover the motivations behind internationalisation of the Indian family small medium enterprises (IFSMEs) and explore whether these enterprises are searching for resources, advanced technologies, strategic assets, revenue benefits, improved efficiency or the new markets etc. Internationalisation by IFSMEs has substantially amplified in recent years. The amplification in the degree of internationalisation requires examination of various factors that have made IFSMEs internationalise. The empirical analysis is done on a sample of 407 IFSMEs using a structured questionnaire. The findings of this study provide evidence of the existence of various factors behind the internationalisation of IFSMEs. These enterprises are found to be inclined towards internationalisation in search of resources, technology, efficiency improvement etc. whereas exploring for new markets factor was reasonably weak referring to the empirical analysis. This analysis of IFSMEs multinationals has some observable implications. The existence of several factors infers that IFSMEs can fetch many benefits to the Indian economy. Also, the Indian family firms that are not very frequent in internationalisation can focus on the key factors which will encourage them to internationalise with more focused efforts.

Keywords: internationalisation; family enterprises; technology; India; multinationals; SME.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBG.2021.118695

International Journal of Business and Globalisation, 2021 Vol.29 No.3, pp.296 - 313

Received: 26 Jan 2019
Accepted: 23 Aug 2019
Published online: 03 Nov 2021 *

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