Qualitative interview study reveals intangible resources overcome internationalization deficits in millennial-led small businesses, highlighting social capital as a primary compensatory mechanism.
This research identifies solutions to barriers to internationalization and their implications for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Latin America led by millennial entrepreneurs. A thematic analysis was conducted on 25 semi-structured interviews with millennial entrepreneurs, drawing on the Resource-Based View (RBV) and Dynamic Capabilities (DC) theories. The findings show that barriers to internationalization, such as regulatory, market, and language barriers, stem from internal capability deficits. Millennial entrepreneurs rely on intangible resources to compensate for those deficits, such as alliances, networking, and benchmarking. RBV and DC are advanced by reframing barriers as internal capability deficits that are compensated by mechanisms of social capital acquisition and learning, and by incorporating an age-cohort perspective. The research is relevant for SMEs and international business (IB) research in emerging economies.
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Quirós et al. (2026) studied this question.
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