Critera for Case Companies
Internationalizing the Small and Medium Sized Firm – four cases
Having set out to investigate SME’s, certain specific criteria were used for the selection of case companies. To define a small and medium sized company, the guidelines directed by the EU were used as a first step1). Furthermore, only companies that still existed on the home market (at least in some form) were considered. The reason for this criterion was that the authors wanted to avoid including companies that had failed with their internationalization process due to not having a functioning business model, i.e. the main reason for failure was not something linked to the internationalization. Since part of the purpose was to investigate the internationalization process from an organizational as well as a leadership viewpoint other criteria were used as well. One criterion demanded that a permanent physical presence through a subsidiary or local office had been set up in at least one other country besides from Sweden. This criterion was chosen in order to be able to investigate specific organizational, managerial aspects etc that arise from having started a local office. Reason for doing so is based on the authors’ experience that those aspects pose an important and difficult challenge during the internationalization process. In order for the chosen case companies to be able to present the authors with relevant and accurate information and avoid poor recollection, the maximum time frame from the first step of the analyzed internationalization process was set to a maximum of 5 years. The choice also fell on companies in different industries. The reason for this was to avoid having difficulties distinguishing between patterns that were due to the internationalization process from specific industry patterns. Due to the general trends over last years in Sweden, and the defined criteria, all of the chosen case companies are in some kind of high tech business.
