- Title
- Entrepreneurial strategies in Asian latecomer firms: linkage, leverage and learning
- Creator
- Mathews, John A.; Tan, Hao
- Relation
- Handbook of East Asian Entrepreneurship p. 30-44
- Relation
- https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415743235
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- What are the distinctive features in entrepreneurial strategies that East Asian firms have adopted to pursue their growth and prosperity? And what theoretical framework can be employed to account for those features? In this chapter, we explore these two questions and provide some preliminary answers. Our examples come from the Chinese wind power and solar photovoltaic (PV) industries, which have emerged and internationalized extremely rapidly, rising to world dominance in less than a decade (Mathews and Tan, 2012). While these firms and their accelerated internationalization are of interest from many perspectives (not least their contribution to the greening of international business), we emphasize in this chapter the challenge they pose for conventional theories of internationalization. The emergence and growth of entrepreneurial firms from East Asia has been the subject of intensive research for the past several decades. Previous studies have focused on entrepreneurial firms from the region, ranging from family businesses from Hong Kong, high tech firms in Taiwan, Korean business conglomerates (chaebols), Japanese business networks, to emerging multinational manufacturers from China. There has also been great heterogeneity across the environments of firms within the region. The region encompasses the second largest advanced economy (Japan), newly industrialized economies (NIEs), including Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong, and the largest emerging economy (China). Not only are economies in the region at various levels of economic development, there also exist large differences in their political systems, cultures, and industrial structures. Despite wide-ranging differences among firms and their environments in the region, some remarkable features have emerged in strategies of many entrepreneurial companies. Those features are certainly most profound in firms from latecomer economies such as South Korea and Taiwan, and now China; but they could also be observed in some Japanese firms especially when Japan itself was a latecomer. Common features shared by many latecomer firms include rapid growth and accelerated internationalization, innovation, reliance on personal and organizational networks, leverage on foreign technologies, as well as the strong role of the state in those firms' success. We apply a theoretical framework that one of us has developed to account for the entrepreneurial strategies of East Asian latecomer firms, namely the linkage, leverage and learning (LLL) framework (Mathews, 2002, 2006a, 2006b). The LLL framework was originally introduced to explain the internationalization strategies and international success of what were dubbed 'Dragon Multinationals' from the Asia Pacific region, as an alternative and complementary framework to the dominant OLI (ownership, locational, internalization) account in International Business.
- Subject
- East Asian business; entrepreneurial strategies; latecomer economies; internationalisation
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1311234
- Identifier
- uon:22174
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780415743235
- Language
- eng
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