SME Internationalization and Export Performance: A Systematic Review with Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Building from the authors’ plan to conceptualize an artificial intelligence (AI) solution that allows SME owners to make more sustainable choices in foreign-market-entry decisions, this systematic literature review (SLR) researches the state-of-the-art in SME internationalization from 1920 to 2023 (since 2014 in more depth). The authors gather all articles in Scopus, tagged with the keyword internationalization (25,303 as of January 2023), order them by citations, and download the top 2000 papers’ metadata for analysis and debate, then narrow it to reviews and SMEs, and use bibliometric visualization and qualitative data analysis software (VOSviewer and NVivo) to identify the key players and determinants of export performance/intensity, and finally draw conclusions. The results reveal key internationalization theories, top authors, reviews, and sources and expand Werner´s determinants via several tables and figures. The findings reveal the rise of relevance regarding theories related to social narratives and corporate activism, but also show that there is still much to do in SME internationalization, namely on what makes a small firm well established in their native market and have success in other countries. The contribution to science is an update on the topic and the pinpointing of several trends and gaps, such as a focus on services, theory integration, longitudinal studies between antecedents and performance, strategic fit versus opportunism, network theory on niche marketing, born-“glocal” strategies, disruptive technologies, and discourse variables, for the future of SME export success.