Depth versus breadth: Exploring variation and performance differences among internationalising new ventures

Despite the wealth of studies on international entrepreneurship that have emerged over recent years, a need exists to further explore variation among internationalising new ventures. In this article, we develop and test a framework suggesting that a new venture’s depth and breadth of internationalisation can be traded off in multiple ways to minimise risk. Through a cluster analysis, we identify four configurations commonly exhibited by internationalising new ventures, which we classify as follows: (1) home regional dabblers, (2) home regional committed, (3) host regional focused and (4) global balanced. Implications for firm-level drivers and performance are discussed.