Birgit Hagen

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Pavia

Purpose This study aims to illustrate how a university can leverage a Blended Intensive Programme (BIP) to act as a boundary spanner in international collaborations and multi-stakeholder value co-creation. This research explores the potential of a reimagined study abroad program to connect disparate entrepreneurial ecosystems and enhance the univer...

Organizational agility (OA) is a prominent strategic goal considered to be a key to success, especially in conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. In this paper, we flip the dominant research focus, that is, how to build or how to transform towards OA, to the under-investigated topic of how to maintain and weave it into th...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore the exogenous and endogenous drivers of the high-growth of Unicorn start-ups along their life cycle, with a particular focus on Unicorns in the fintech industry. Design/methodology/approach The study employs an explorative longitudinal analysis with a matched-pair of two cases of Unicorns start-ups w...

Il presente capitolo è incentrato su uno dei nuovi paradigmi di produzione e consumo, l’economia circolare - i.e., “un’economia in cui gli scarti e l'inquinamento sono minimizzati grazie al design consapevole di prodotti, processi e servizi, il valore delle risorse è mantenuto il più a lungo possibile e i sistemi naturali vengono rigenerati” (Gusme...

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41267-021-00449-8

There is near unanimity among international business scholars that it takes more time to expand internationally than domestically. Hence, this is why some are puzzled by born globals (BGs), firms that make large foreign sales at birth or shortly afterwards. Explanations given for this “anomaly” are that BGs have exceptional resources—advanced techn...

The aim of this paper is, through a two-staged literature review, to identify the role and impact of causation, effectuation, and bricolage logics during internationalization and, in particular, in entry-mode choice. The results show that entrepreneurs in their internationalization decisions can follow one, a combination, or a sequence of logics de...

Nowadays, the buzzwords for organizations to be prepared for the competitive environment’s challenges are sustainability, digitalization, resilience and agility. However, despite the fact that these concepts have come into common use at the level of both scholars and practitioners, the nature of the relation between sustainability and resilience ha...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize strategic agility in entrepreneurial internationalization and highlight the role of marketing “under particular conditions” – those of early and fast internationalizers. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on in-depth case studies of four entrepreneurial internationalizers using an...

This study examines the relationship between international performance and the orientation of the firm towards trademark acquisition, and discusses family ownership as a moderator of this association. We conceptualize our study along three interrelated lines of ‘openness’ i.e. openness towards external resources, openness of governance, and opennes...

Reaching customers globally and building a global brand and market presence is a demanding task for any firm. For early and rapidly internationalising small firms this is exceptionally challenging due to the restraints that ensue from the liabilities of smallness, newness and foreignness and the speed of their internationalisation. We argue that en...

Standardization versus adaptation of the marketing mix strategy in foreign markets has been one of the key research areas in international marketing since the late 1960s. Based on the existing studies we have a broad understanding of factors having an effect on standardization and adaptation levels, and the implications of the marketing mix on perf...

This study provides a theoretical analysis of SME strategic postures and presents empirical evidence of strategic types of international SMEs across three European countries, namely Italy, Finland and Greece. Empirical investigation based on a sample of more than 550 international SMEs is performed through cluster analysis. Findings suggest there a...

This study investigates the interplay of firms' business strategies and their export activities, with a special emphasis on the role of niche strategies in the early and fast internationalisation of new and young ventures. By coupling theoretical arguments with case-based empirical evidence, we offer insights on how the niche strategic pattern can...

Be international? Be innovative? Be international and innovative? Following the logic of the upper echelon (UE) perspective, this paper studies the impact of the entrepreneur(s) demography, background, and experience on their strategic choices, i.e., innovation, internationalization, or a combination of the two strategies. We employ cluster analysi...

This impressive Handbook provides a dynamic perspective on the international entrepreneurial strategies of SMEs, including the role and experience of their founders, as well as the collaboration of these SMEs in networks with larger firms. The expert contributors from all over the world and the editors explore the origin and evolution of internatio...

After a first section dedicated to the discussion of the methodological foundations of the image-based research protocols, the chapter introduces the “wall of pictures” protocol. The authors first present the preparation of instrument, the validity check, and the textual data coding process. In the final paragraphs, a large range of descriptive, bi...

Born global firms have stimulated substantial academic attention as regards their start up but research has neglected their subsequent, ongoing internationalisation. This contribution extends analysis from the inception and childhood to the growth and maturity of such firms. We investigate whether born global are also "born to run" companies; we al...

In the last years, the global economy has undergone a dramatic change. Developed economies face the challenge of new players from emerging countries, slow growth problems, and even recession, combined with a weaker entrepreneurial activity (Amoros and Bosma, 2014). This new economic order calls for a significant reshaping of competition, which leve...

After a first section dedicated to the discussion of the methodological foundations of the image-based research protocols, the chapter introduces the "wall of pictures" protocol. The authors first present the preparation of instrument, the validity check, and the textual data coding process. In the final paragraphs, a large range of descriptive, bi...

This paper identifies different strategic types of internationalised SMEs, in so doing providing managers and entrepreneurs with a much better understanding of the main strategic options and their relationship with the international performance of firms. We provide a theoretical analysis of strategic orientations and strategic behaviour in internat...

At the beginning of the internet era in the 1990s, the hypothesis of a borderless world was put forward and profound changes in international business practices were imagined (for example, Quelch and Klein, 1996; Hamill, 1997). Hamill (1997, p.300) saw the internet as ‘a fundamentally different environment … and new international marketing paradigm...

International new ventures or born globals have been studied and discussed broadly as regards their start-up, mainly trying to define and examine some key dimensions of their internationalisation process (i.e. intensity or degree, speed, and scope of internationalisation). The drivers of the phenomenon have been investigated but rarely have they be...