Thèse de Nesibe Nur Unal

Résumé

Growing global competition strongly affects all firms’ activities and forced many firms to compete internationally. Exporting SMEs face many challenges when operating in international environment. Their challenge studied in this thesis is the necessity of executing successfully conflicting processes simultaneously despite their limited resources and inexperience. Being able to implement this is a firm capability called ambidexterity, and the firm structure that provides sustainable ambidexterity is called ambidextrous (March, 1991).
In spite of the growing interest concerning SMEs exporting activities, it is evident from the literature that sufficient theoretical framework for the exporting of SMEs is lacking (Ribau et al., 2018), particularly about how they manage their export operations by using their restricted resources, how they compete in fast-changing uncertain global marketplace with inexperience and etc. (Xie and Li 2018). The importance of these multitask applications cannot be ignored for SMEs, which have to get more efficiency from their scarce resources in order to survive in the market. Therefore, this study focuses on ambidexterity of exporting SMEs and examines other export related capabilities that contribute to export success.
This thesis consists of 3 articles in which they statistically analyze the interaction of different capabilities with ambidexterity. Although the results were generally compatible with the ones in the literature, some results were not as predicted. Also, these researches conducted on SMEs in Turkey aim to contribute to exporting SMEs in developing countries in terms of export practices and company structures.

Keywords

Ambidexterity, exploration, exploitation, market learning, exporting SMEs, dynamic capabilities, strategic orientations, strategic flexibility, performance