Journal of Enterprising Culture

The opening of international economies and markets has created a new competitive environment, and has given Mexicans more business opportunities. An important component in the training and development of entrepreneurial skills can occur at the Mexican institutions of higher education, where students can obtain the theoretical and practial knowledge required to operate in the new global environment. The purpose of this paper is to describe the innovative Entrepreneur Program at the Instituto Tecnologicoy de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in Mexico, which directly addresses the problems afflicting Mexico's small business sector, and, at the same time, provides the entrepreneurial motivation and support that contribute to the success of the Mexican small businesses.

In economies in transition, the newly emerging private sector lacks professional, financial, and economic structure provided by ministries and government agencies to state-owned enterprises. In mature market economies, the small and medium-size enterprise (SME) sector has been acknowledged as being the backbone of the economy. Research on the European Union reveals that the success of entrepreneurship depends on a conducive climate which includes intermediate support structures, such as branch/sectoral organisations, specialised SME research organisations, business advisory centres, innovation centres, employers' organisations, etc. The experience from the economies in transition in Central and Eastern Europe shows that the entrepreneurs suffer from weak support of financial, management, environment and trade services. In order to develop a healthy SME sector, a favourable environment should be created and supporting intermediate structures established. Such support organisations should, in addition, bridge the gap between government agencies and the private sector.

After characterizing regionalization/internationalization/globalization, the paper discusses criteria for and dimensions of these concepts. It presents then results from an international longitudinal survey (Interstratos 1991/1995) among 3000 SMEs in eight European countries. Two questions of internationalization in European SMEs are answered: Which forms of internationalization (direct export to agents, direct export to customers, granting licence, cooperation, joint venture, distribution subsidiary abroad, manufacturing subsidiary abroad) appear to be predominant? Which are success factors in the perception of the entrepreneurs? The paper results in pragmatic rules and principles for SME internationalization.

This paper analyzes the international growth of 82 young technology-based firms in Finland from a resource-based perspective. These firms manufacture electro-mechanical instruments or devices, are independent, technology-based, and internationally active. The analysis focuses on resource leveraging as a mechanism for facilitating international growth. It is suggested that resource leveraging leads to an interesting paradox: the more growth - oriented the firm is, the more embedded it becomes; that is, the higher the number of network relationships the firm has to set up.

This study relates that the 'business-as-usual' scenario has come to an end and questions the general practice of the present ethnocentric-led institutional tourism development in the Far East within an analytical framework.

It asserts that global cities play a crucial role in the systematic search for innovation and its diffusion, amongst others, through the regionalization of the metropolitan economies in an hierarchy of central places. The study focuses on Hong Kong, which has the potential to perform the function of "incubator" for innovation and its transfer throughout the region.

However, the results indicate that whilst tourism organizations in Hong Kong are engaged in some type of innovation, they do not apply systematic processes to advance innovation. Furthermore, the results also reveal that local service enterprises are less inclined to develop new service offerings in overseas markets than international enterprises.

Prior studies distinguished marketing effectiveness only by performance of companies. In this study the focus was on size and type of company. The sample comprised Singapore companies consisting of: Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), Large Local Companies (LLCs), and Multi-national companies (MNCs). The objective of the study was to ascertain the marketing effectiveness of two groupings of companies, namely:

(1) SMEs and LLCs as the local group of companies, for comparison with MNCs, and (2) SMEs compared to LLCs. It was generally hypothesised that MNCs are more marketing effective than the local group, and that there is no difference in marketing effectiveness between the local groups of companies.

Analysis of the responses suggests that there is no clear cut evidence that MNCs are more marketing effective than the smaller local companies. There are, however a number of marketing areas where MNCs appear to be more effective. As for the local companies, apart from some difference in focus, which are not necessarily indicative of better or worse marketing effectiveness, there appear to be no significant differences in marketing effectiveness between them.

The implication of these findings probably is that size and type of company have no major overall bearing on marketing effectiveness. Perhaps all organisations concur with the view that "the market genesis of every business has become gospel" (Hanan, 1993).