Export Knowledge Absorption and SMEs’ International Performance

The Absorptive Capacity (AC) perspective has generated significant scholarly interest across a large number of disciplines. Despite this interest, AC literature has aimed primarly to explain innovation on the basis of technological knowledge absorption. As a result, knowledge and information relating to an organization’s international market environment were mostly ignored, even though AC itself was first defined as a firm’s superior capacity to use information to commercial ends (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990). Especially in the case of SMEs, it is often suggested that they should better manage information and develop superior knowledge and capabilities relative to the management of foreign operations (Kuivalainen & Bell, 2004) in order to improve their international performance. This research work provides two major contributions. First, it proposes a conceptualization of the AC framework adapted to export information activities of SMEs, based on Zahra and George’s (2002) approach to the AC concept. Second, it combines insights from the AC, marketing, international business, market orientation (MO) and knowledge based view (KBV) literature to develop a framework for describing and empirically testing the processing of export information in SMEs and its impact on their international performance.