Becoming a multinational enterprise: Using industry recipes to achieve rapid multinationalization

We aim to build a greater understanding of how young entrepreneurial firms internationalize fast through foreign subsidiaries to become a multinational enterprise (MNE). Despite the prevalence of fast-paced international expansion, theory development on how it is achieved through high-commitment entry modes has been scarce. Our work substantially addresses this gap by conceptualizing how rapid multinationalization occurs. Using qualitative case studies, we explore eight young entrepreneurial firms operating in the software-as-a-service industry aspiring to achieve early market dominance internationally through rapid multinationalization. Drawing on the concept of industry recipes, we explain how recipe heuristics and recipe augmentation enable rapid multinationalization and showcase the economic and knowledge acquisition logics which underpin these endeavors. This study introduces internationalization via industry recipe, explains the micro-level regulation of internationalization speed, and contributes to aligning international entrepreneurship and MNE perspectives on internationalization.