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1. Introduction
The relevance of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has been extensively analysed in the academic literature (Juergensen et al., 2020; Robu, 2013; Wright et al., 2007). This literature stream has not only addressed the role of SMEs as contributors to a nation's economic growth (Abbasi et al., 2021), but also as pioneers in the adoption of new technologies, production processes or business models to face global competition (Juergensen et al., 2020). SMEs now face the necessity to undertake a digital transformation (Dam et al., 2019; Pelletier and Cloutier, 2019; Ulas, 2019) in order to catch new growth opportunities and cope with new challenges in domestic and international markets (Jafari-Sadeghi et al., 2019; Hervé et al., 2020). Academic literature commonly investigates digitalisation and internationalisation of SMEs as separate dimensions (Bouwman et al., 2019; Louw and Nieuwenhuizen, 2020). In fact, international business (IB) scholars have analysed the internationalisation paths of SMEs by proposing different approaches that focus on the processes that lead to the outreach of new markets. While in the domain of digital entrepreneurship, academics have highlighted that SMEs have started to adopt digital tools to capture the necessary market knowledge and commitment described by internationalisation theorists.
Building on those streams of research, we posit that digitalisation plays a key role in fostering knowledge acquisition processes, ultimately easing the internationalisation of SMEs. Past research has focused its attention on the degree to which SMEs have adopted information and communications technology infrastructures (ICT) or how digital technologies have changed the interaction between activities in the value chain of SMEs, resulting in the adoption of new business models (de Perea et al., 2019; Magnani et al., 2021; Bivona and Cruz, 2021). However, literature delving into the role of digitalisation as an enabler to SME internationalisation remains fragmented (Cassetta et al., 2020; Kergroach, 2020; Lee, 2015). Henceforth the need to systematically review what has been said on the intertwining of these two research fields and the necessity to propose new promising research avenues.
From a practical perspective, while digitalisation and internationalisation are connected to business model scalability (Bargoni et al., 2023; Cassetta et al., 2020; Stallkamp and Schotter, 2021), many SMEs are unable to...