Active Internationalization of Small and Medium-Sized Software Enterprises - Cases of French Software Companies

Abstract

Implementations of software production processes usually ignore organizational, market, and economical attributes of products that are to be inserted in international markets. Software engineering has begun to deal with the business aspects of software products only recently. The Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge v3.0 presents two concepts of life cycle: the software development life cycle and the software product life cycle. The second is more concerned with business issues related to software products, but research on those issues is still due. In this sense, this paper aims to answer the following question: what factors allow small and medium software enterprises to offer high value added products in order to enter and remain in the international market? This work selects four research dimensions from literature and explores a number of variables inside those dimensions, which are considered as candidates to help explaining a successful process of active internationalization. The paper presents a multiple case study that shows that although innovation, entrepreneurship, and foreign market knowledge are important dimensions for the active internationalization, networking is not as relevant as it could be thought.