Learning, unlearning and internationalisation: Evidence from the pre-export phase

The internationalisation process has been described as a process of learning under which a business increases its commitment abroad as the company acquires knowledge on new markets and on the nature of the process itself. The present work proposes a model that relates the possession of a base of knowledge originated in supra-organisational, organisational and individual sources, as the actively new decision of seeking knowledge related to the start of the exporting activity. Integrating the literature on the pre-export behaviour of the business and the theory of organisational learning, we propose that such relationship is influenced by two dimensions: the export intention and the context of unlearning. The sample included 103 SMEs in the pre-exporting phase. Results support the conception of the process of internationalisation as a process of learning under which a prior base of knowledge is combined with periods of unlearning and a search for new knowledge.