In the Need of Speed - The Impact of Organizational Learning on the Competitiveness of Born Transnationals

The globalization process stimulates more and more start-ups entering international markets at their earliest convenience. Supported by modern IT and logistics systems, this option is available for many ventures that become more and more independent from their country of origin. For transnational companies, as heterarchical networks without typical internal hub structures and a high degree of responsiveness, this holds particularly true. This is the reason why this paper focuses the 'born transnational' type of international entrepreneurship. The question arises how international ventures achieve international competitiveness. This paper argues that the pace and the alignment of processes of external and internal learning are of utmost importance. Knowledge generation, absorption, integration, and company-wide transfer play a pivotal role in this regard. Insofar, the research question of the paper is: What are the factors that accelerate organizational learning of 'born transnationals'? Based on competence-based theory and a particular model of organizational learning, the paper presents research propositions on the learning process of Ôborn transnationals'.