Paper info

Becoming an insider: the internationalization of firms’ in the health care sector

Katarina Lagerstrom and Cecilia Lindholm

The paper was published at the 34th IMP-conference in Sri Lanka in 2018.

During the past decades, a number of countries have reformed their health care systems, allowing private actors to become health care providers. Accordingly, health care markets are rapidly emerging all over the world, constituting important opportunities for SMEs to expand their operations internationally. Since the health care sector is characterized by high complexity - being highly regulated, highly professionalized and to a high extent localized - entering such markets are greatly influenced by the institutional context and the SME’s relationships to political, legal, professional and business actors. The business network in which the SME is embedded is of significant importance in gaining access to new markets and to local market knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to enhance our knowledge of health care SMEs’ means to build and use network relationships in order to contribute to both the IMP research tradition as well as the internationalization process literature