When the Journey—And Not Just the Destination—Matters: How Internationalization Shapes Entrepreneurial Experimentation

Internationalization—gaining exposure to cross-border markets—is often the result of an entrepreneur’s experimentation and strategy around their core business. Scholars have shown how entrepreneurs develop products or services, and after achieving some traction, turn to international markets to help them continue growing and scaling their businesses. Yet, what may be neglected in this prior work is how internationalization may not always be the result of—but instead the catalyst to—new information, entrepreneurial discovery and sensemaking, and important developments in an entrepreneur’s core business. Through an inductive field study of 84 entrepreneurs across 27 countries in the global technology industry, we examine how internationalization influences the entrepreneurial process and the profound effect that it has on how entrepreneurs identify and exploit opportunities. We find that internationalization shapes the way these entrepreneurs engage in experimentation, and in turn, how they define their business. We propose a process model that sheds light on how entrepreneurs (a) define, (b) scope, and (c) externally validate ideas based on their international exposure—a process that aids them in creating and capturing value. Our findings show how cross-border markets may offer unanticipated information to entrepreneurs, which adjusts their perceived choice sets and helps them ultimately define their business, contributing to research on experimentation and internationalization and new theory on how cross-border exposure shapes innovation and growth.