Driving and preventive factors in the emergence and success of born globals in early stages studied by the meta-synthesis method

Previous studies related to born globals are dispersed, heterogeneous and unsystematic, and the research in this field has not been done in an integrated way. In spite of the dispersion of findings, different researchers have tried to discover mechanisms (antecedents, moderators and consequences) in the area of born global firms. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of born globals, studies have taken into account various issues. Since born globals are important for the future of business and the findings of previous studies are disorganized, there is a need to develop integrated conceptual models and comprehensive theoretical frameworks. The necessity of investigating born globals is mentioned in previous works too. The dearth of research on born globals and the need for developing a comprehensive framework are the main drivers for conducting this review research. As a result, the aim of this article is to collect and integrate all the empirical studies in the world regarding the driving and preventive factors and the consequences of born global firms in a comprehensive framework.

Since this study is going to integrate previous research findings and finally provide a framework for the comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon, meta-synthesis is a good method to serve the purpose. However, since all empirical studies (through quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods) should be included in this study, it is necessary to use the mixed meta-synthesis method. A six-step process is considered as a methodological framework of this study. These six steps include formulating the research problem and question, reviewing the literature, evaluating the research studies for identification and inclusion, selecting and doing meta-synthesis techniques for integrating and analyzing the qualitative research findings, presenting a combination of the findings of previous studies, and showing the process. As a result, this article summarizes the findings of 85 empirical studies (only studies related to the early success of born globals) by using the mixed meta-synthesis method and integrates them in a comprehensive conceptual framework.

Previous studies have examined the role of global vision as a meditator variable, but there is no research on the moderating role of global vision in different groups of output variables. Distinguishing among the dimensions of experience and the moderating role of experiences is also a research gap. The role of government policies for facilitating the international experiences has not been investigated yet. The role of variables such as managers' global vision or international experience can be studies as a moderator variable. In addition, this study has evaluated the effect of moderators. It has summarized and integrated the empirical results regarding driving and preventive factors and outcomes in the field of born global firms and specifically in the initial stage of their business lifecycle. Based on the developed framework, future opportunities for research and theoretical and practical implications are suggested. According to the adopted theories in the reviewed papers, our first and foremost theoretical suggestion is using the perspective of entrepreneurial financing (and other financial perspectives in the field of born globals) as well as the transformational leadership theory (and other theories in leadership literature). These two theoretical gaps are important in our research because the vital role of management team characteristics in born globals implies the importance of leadership style, and born globals are able to overcome strange costs and resource limitations through selecting the source of financing. This research extends the results of Weerawardena et al. (2007), Gerschewski et al. (2015) and Gerschewski (2011) and adds the results of Knight and Liesch (2016) to this area. Since a large number of research works has been done on the initial stage of formation and success of born globals and this knowledge has been summarized in this study, born global researchers can test this framework in different fields and countries and to create new perspectives and variables for future research. It is useful to reach a general and valid understanding of the advent and the initial success of born globals before going beyond to search the successes and mechanisms of long-term survival.

This paper summarizes and integrates the empirical results regarding the driving and preventive factors and outcomes in the area of born global firms specifically the initial stage of their business lifecycle. However, there are some limitations in this study, including using only two databases and ignoring Google Scholar, EBSCO etc. This questions the comprehensiveness of the research and denotes the likelihood of human error in filtering papers. Hence, there might be some papers in the selected databases or other sources related to the field of this study.