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Introduction
There has been a proliferation of "little heroes" in international markets in recent times, going by various names including: Hot growth companies or gazelles ([18] Business Week , 2004a, p. 50), Hidden champions ([19] Business Week , 2004b, p. 56), Born globals ([84] Oviatt and McDougall, 2005; [69] Knight and Cavusgil, 1996, [79] Madsen and Servais, 1997), International SMEs ([67] Knight, 2000), Virtual instant global entrepreneurs ([62] Katz et al. , 2003), and Accidental exporters ([103] Styles and Harcourt, 2001). The emergence and success of these types of firms need to be reconciled with our theories of firm internationalization but they present problems which have led researchers to propose alternative types of explanations ([87] Rialp and Rialp, 2001; [29] Coviello and McAuley, 1999; [105] Styles and Seymour, 2006). An important issue related to these new types of explanations is the process of firm opportunity recognition in international markets. By this we mean the way people and firms discover opportunities to enter international markets for the first time, or to go into other international markets, and how and why they decide to exploit them. International opportunity recognition is the beginning of the internationalization process and deserves more systematic research attention than it has so far received because it is the trigger that starts everything off.
A review of the internationalization literature reveals that empirical studies in the area have given scant attention to the process of opportunity recognition. Studies of opportunity recognition have largely been the domain of entrepreneurship research in a domestic context ([95] Shane, 2000; [3] Arenius and de Clercq, 2005; [78] Lumpkin and Lichtenstein, 2005). Existing theories of internationalization implicitly assume that internationalization is preceded by opportunity recognition but provide little explanation of this. These include the Uppsala model's process of knowledge and learning ([53], [54] Johanson and Vahlne, 1977, 1990), the network perspective's focus on information flow and resource links ([57], [58] Johanson and Mattsson, 1988, 1992; [8] Axelsson and Johanson, 1992), and the eclectic paradigm's ownership (O), location (L), and internalization (I) advantages (b35 b36 b37 b38 Dunning, 1977, 1979, 1988, 1993) which all take for granted that a firm recognizes a foreign market opportunity. [53], [54] Johanson and Vahlne (1977, 1990) repeatedly used the word "opportunity" in their discussion...