Entrepreneurial competence in managing partnerships and partnership knowledge exchange: Impact on performance differences in export expansion stages

Research is lacking on the role of international entrepreneurship when the focus is on management's efforts in external organization and firm level dissemination of knowledge from partners after a foreign market entry. The theoretical framework fills this gap and analyses the relationship between entrepreneurial competence and two relational capabilities of partnership knowledge exchange and partnership management. It further investigates their influence on firms' performance at the initial and subsequent export expansion stages using a sample of 100 firms from ICT industry. The results indicate a positive relationship between entrepreneurial competence and the relational capabilities. However, relational capability of partnership knowledge exchange is only found to influence the initial export expansion stage. The overall theoretical model provides more support for the effects of entrepreneurial competence at the subsequent export expansion stage. For managerial purposes, the results demonstrate that different capabilities are needed at different stages of export expansion and that capabilities do not always provide competitive advantage.