Internationalization of Science-Based Start-Ups: Opportunity or Requirement?

The current economic context is characterized by a global hypercompetition. The modern entrepreneurial approach is, therefore, more and more focused on the identification and actualization of new opportunities, like emerging on the international scene, rather than being based on a rational combination of know-how and of marketing expectations. Nowadays, the phenomena of internationalization affects every type of organization: private and public, for-profit and nonprofit, and large and small. As a consequence of the above, international entrepreneurship (IE) has recently emerged as a research field and this article aims at exploring some its implications. IE may be considered a set of new and innovative activities aiming at the creation of value and growth beyond national borders, by the combination of innovative, proactive, and risk-seeking behaviors that crosses national borders. In this context, we focus on a specific case: knowledge-based firms. In order to achieve this scope, after a preliminary section delineating the research field, we have developed our study in a number of steps that approach the research topic. Firstly, we explore and summarize the literature about research on the emerging area of international entrepreneurship. Then, we present the accumulated knowledge stemming from the relationship between knowledge and internationalization, looking at the phenomena of international start-ups. After this, we explore international entrepreneurship by academic context, identifying the main factors that influence the choice of the market on the part of the knowledge-based firms. Lastly, we characterize knowledge-based entrepreneurship as a virtuous combination of knowledge and entrepreneurship. Finally, we draw conclusions identifying the factors able to boost capacities for such expansion of firms originating from innovation and that have operations suited to a widely ultra-national context.