Navigating windows of opportunity: The role of international experience

Abstract

Research Summary: Scholars have noted that pronounced changes in consumer demand and technology often offer firms temporary opportunities to strengthen their performance vis-à-vis rivals. This article contributes to the literature on windows of opportunity from an organizational learning perspective. It investigates whether the depth and breadth of a firm's international experience with pronounced changes in demand conditions (demand windows) and technologies (technological windows) affect its ability to take advantage of such changes within a country to increase its market share. The results, based on a sample of 615 telecommunication companies competing in 124 countries, suggest that mainly two out of four dimensions of international experience help firms to exploit windows of opportunity in a country. Managerial Summary: What can help multinational companies (MNCs) to navigate periods of marked changes in demand and technology? When an MNC encounters a marked change in demand or technology in a country, it may have already experienced in the past many or just a few of these events, depending on its international footprint, and this serves to assess the MNC's international experience with such changes. Using data on telecommunication companies, we show that both (a) an MNC's repeated exposure to a certain type of change over time (depth of international experience) and (b) the variety of changes an MNC has been exposed to (breadth of international experience) in international markets may help the MNC to obtain market share advantages when such changes occur in a country.