The Sensemaking of Born Globals in International First-Time Opportunities

Abstract

Born globals can often be characterized as entrepreneurial firms that lack resources and face high level of ambiguity towards their future. Despite these factors, they tend to have international opportunities in the early stage of their life cycle that can be called international first-time opportunities. As the effectuation and causation approaches manage to explain the reasoning of entrepreneurial firms from resource exploitation perspective, the cognitive reasoning has also a remarkable role in the entrepreneurial firms, wherein the role of the entrepreneur individual is highlighted. Moreover, while the sensemaking phenomenon in business context emphasizes the causation type predictability in terms of opportunity creation, the born globals in the early stage of their life cycle are not often able to provide such predictability for different stakeholders of the company.

This study covers firstly the effectuation and causation approaches in order to clarify their central role in entrepreneurial decision-making. The sensemaking phenomenon is considered in this study from the international entrepreneurship perspective, that highlights sense-giving, particularly, for employees and investors as stakeholders in opportunity creation. The cognitive reasoning chapter considers heuristic and analogical reasoning in order to understand the knowledge and experience exploitation of born globals. The methodology part of this thesis includes the justification to use qualitative interviews of three born globals in terms of case study analysis. When it comes to the results of the case analysis, the born globals tend to make sense towards their employees and investors based on causation, effectuation and enactment logics. Moreover, the heuristic reasoning has been often used in the case companies while they lack the specific knowledge or experience related to their industry, international markets or entrepreneurship. The analogical reasoning has been exploited more when the case companies have gained knowledge and experiences after the foreign market entries or if the companies have other type of knowledge or experience, that matches with their international first-time opportunities.