Rethinking The Paradigm Of Service Internationalisation: Less Resource-intensive Market Entry Modes For Information-intensive Soft Services

摘要

1. The service sector is becoming increasingly important in the global economy; this is especially true for 'soft' services involved in providing information and knowledge-based solutions. It has been suggested that soft service firms are restricted to internationalising through market entry modes requiring substantial resource commitment, such as wholly owned subsidiaries and equity based joint ventures. We argue that this assessment is based on overly simplistic assumptions regarding the characteristics of these information-intensive soft service firms. 2. Focusing on the nature of the value-adding activities and operations of these firms, an information transformation model is proposed to describe the value creation process for information-intensive soft service firms. 3. Using the model to represent different types of internationalisation situations yields 10 lower-involvement approaches available to information-intensive soft service firms seeking to enter foreign markets.