Capabilities and International Startups' International Performance: A Systematic Literature Review

The study of how capability relates to international startup’s international performance has become a relevant topic of research in international entrepreneurship in recent years. Unfortunately, such rapid developments have led to theoretical inconsistencies and empirical gaps that could result in an incomplete understanding of the relationship between capabilities and international startups’ international performance. To address these issues and motivate future work, we first introduced capability categorization models, and second conducted a systematic review of 25 articles that link capabilities to the international performance of international startups. The results show that: (1) research has focused on substantive capabilities that related to international market and venture internal operations, while paid little attention to capabilities that related to international market and venture internal administrations; (2) research has focused more on dynamic capabilities that related to international market observation & evaluation and venture resource reconfiguration, while paid less attention to venture resource renewal and international market resource acquisition; (3) unbalanced attention has been paid to international market oriented substantive and dynamic capabilities. Building on these analyses, we proposed a research agenda that investigating the relationship between capability configurations and international startups’ international performance.