Antecedents, Managerial Decisions and Outcomes of Business Model Transfer Across Countries

Abstract

Research on how firms rebuild their business models on entering a foreign market has been built on medium and large enterprises and on registered exporters, leaving thinly evidenced the mechanism by which a very small firm rebuilds what it sells and how it delivers it. This review synthesises that literature within the Antecedents-Decisions-Outcomes framework and follows one variable across all three axes: the founder-detachability of the operating asset, meaning how far the value a firm sells can be produced by someone other than the person who designed it. Twenty-four studies were assembled through a bounded purposive search reported under the SPAR-4-SLR protocol, nine examined in full text. They are read against ten primary documents from three companies the author founded and led in succession, a creative studio in Russia, a children's retail chain in Indonesia and a home-services company in the United States, so that the review traces how one founder's operating practice developed across three rebuilds rather than assessing firms from the outside. Three synthesis matrices and a cross-case comparison show that the corpus measures outcomes the smallest firms cannot use, that its evidence concentrates in Europe and in firms an order of magnitude larger, and that the moves which make a business executable by other people are recorded in contracts, work instructions and specifications rather than in the constructs the literature reports. The managerial instruments behind those moves, and a gap map with the studies that would close it, are the substance of the article.