WIBF@Beykent

Entrepreneurship, innovation and internationalisation are substantially interrelated. In an increasingly competitive world economy these are getting more importance. In 2000 at its Lizbon meeting, the European Council set the objective of making the European Union “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world”. Entrepreneurship, innovation and internationalisation are essential ingredients of achieving such objectives as they are now three of the most important factors for growth and job creation in open market economies.

With the beginning of the internet era, entrepreneurship in international scale has become easier. Many start-ups now aim the international market from their inception. In other words, the number of so called "born globals” is increasing very quickly. Therefore, international entrepreneurship has also become a significant concept in the business literature. Currently, many countries and international organisations focus on international entrepreneurship for job creation and economic growth. This is particularly important these days as the effects of the global economic crisis still have been present.

Small companies (or small and medium sized enterprises [SMEs] in general) are entrepreneurial in their nature. SMEs are not always growth oriented individually. Many small business owners do not aim to grow the company size at all. But since the number of SMEs in any economy is overwhelming, they contribute substantially to GNPs and also to employment. Many of these firms are family owned. Corporate governance issues have interesting aspects in family owned-firms. The unification of ownership and management enables the top management to make opportunistic investments by relying on intuition. Therefore, such firms are more flexible in comparison with shareholders-owned and managerially-controlled firms to adapt to changing environments, to enter new markets or, to introduce new products. Perhaps because of this attribute, family firms do tend perform better in adverse economic conditions.

SMEs are also very important in many countries (as well as in Germany where they play a critical role in forming a middle class society so called Mittelstand that is also the backbone of the German economy). On the other hand, it seems that SMEs in general (and also many German SMEs are reluctant to invest in foreign countries though export orientation historically has been the case). There may me various factual and psychological reasons behind this approach. However, increasing economic integration among nations forces companies to be involved in international business much more than earlier. In this line, foreign direct investment (FDI) has also become as important as export business. In fact, FDI is currently has a pivotal role for international trade flows. At present two third of the world trade volume is under the control of multinational companies. Interestingly, multinational companies are not generally large or big companies as is supposed by many. They are rather smaller companies involved in FDI and other foreign operation modes such as international franchising, contract manufacturing, licencing etc.. Together with those internationalisation tendencies SME´s cannot resist against the progressive movement of digitalisation or Industry 4.0. For this reason and because of the fact that many small-sized multinationals are also family owned corporations, it seems that internationalisation is now not an option but a must for nearly all companies; small or big.

So far, the internationalisation of SMEs and family-owned small firms and also small multinationals have been studied relatively lesser than the potential. In this respect, the WIBF’s 3st International Business Conference will focus on international entrepreneurship and small firm internationalisation, and also on activities small multinational companies. The conference will be a global forum aimed at assessing the impact of, and generating discussion regarding, these recent developments in order to reach a deeper understanding of the evident opportunities, risks, and outcomes. The main themes of the conference are social and economic outcomes of foreign investments by small multinational enterprises; internationalisation of small firms and international entrepreneurship; how these outcomes are influenced by home countries and international organizations, through legislation, other legal arrangements, policies, and unofficial mechanisms. The conference also aims to identify the similarities and differences between small multinational enterprises from emerging and developed countries, and to analyse the effects of these on employment, growth and development issues in home and host countries. The Conference will explore both theoretical issues in the field and practical issues in formulating policy and strategy and it will pay attention to the issue of employment and growth. Some major questions and topics would be:

• Why and how SMEs internationalize? What are the major motivations and strategies?
• How new business models can be generated through international entrepreneurship?
• How a turbulent international environment in terms of economic crisis and political upheaval affects international entrepreneurship?
• FDI by small multinationals and effects of their activities on value creation, employment and growth in home and host countries
• Lessons to be learned from the successful small multinationals in terms of internationalization and foreign direct investment activities