Creative Globalization

3Born Global

3.1. Definition

Terminologically speaking, “born global” organizations are a recent introduction. Other expressions are also used, such as “fast and early internationalization”, but based on close boundaries. It is a matter of characterizing firms or organizations that have a relationship with different parts of the world that are more complex than exporting firms, even if the most commonly used statistical criterion, namely more than 25% of international activity before the end of the first 3 years of activity, does not make it possible to distinguish clearly between a “born exporting firm” and a “born global” firm.

The term “born global” was introduced following the observation of bimodal distribution for internationalization criteria. In 1993, the time that a new Australian company took to internationalize concerned two types: companies took 27 years on average, and others did it in 2 years at most.

An Australian study indicated that the phenomenon was encountered in all sectors, not just in high-tech ones. For new enterprise projects, “global” projects are generally larger in size and often appear in around half of countries, such as Belgium and Romania.

There are many indicators of globalization: regions well integrated into intensive trade flows will have a high rate of business start-ups called “born global” and this rate will decrease for less well-integrated regions and those with fewer connections to networks. OECD studies confirm that the global “average ...