What Drives Precocity? A Study of Indian Technology-Intensive Firms

Precocity is a temporal dimension of early international orientation. This article analyzes the factors that influence precocity in the context of technology-intensive firms from India. It uses a logistic regression model to examine entrepreneurial, network, and location-specific factors and finds that firms led by young entrepreneurs with foreign education and work experience in foreign markets and experience of startups are more likely to be precocious. Location and networks also emerge as significant drivers of early internationalization. The study contributes to the literature on early internationalization for developing markets and is the starting point for an examination of the born global phenomenon for the Indian information technology industry.