Exploring International Strategies: A Comparative Analysis of Global Best Practice Guides and the Need for a Unified Conceptual Framework

The Internationalization of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises is a widespread process in the current economic context and with growing importance, being strongly linked to the extension to foreign markets, but also with rising levels of competitiveness. In this context, companies are increasingly required to take more complex strategic decisions. Recent research has shown that internationalization has surpassed direct export and it now includes concepts such as sustainability, digitalization, and supply chain resilience. However, the main problem identified is that the current good-practice guides for internationalization which should help these companies in their journey, have the information extensively fragmented and are not organized in a clear and coherent structure, making it difficult for managers to understand how recommended steps relate to one another in practice.

Through a qualitative comparative analysis, we compared eight internationalization guides, gathered from Romania, European Union and United States institutional, academic and entrepreneurial sources, to observe the differences in perspectives and where they align. From this study, two problems arise: first, fragmented practices can complicate managerial decision making for smaller enterprises and second, cultural and digital dimensions receive less attention than financial ones. Based on the gaps that we identified, we propose a four-pillar framework that comprise internal readiness, cultural and digital awareness, administrative compliance and long-term monitoring post-entry into a single structure.