学会誌

　The purpose of this paper is to explore the internationalization process of Japanese SME manufacturers with case studies. Japanese SME manufacturers had depended on the domestic large companies under subcontract relationship. This means that managerial activities of Japanese SME manufacturers have been restricted to Japanese domestic market. However, due to the global competition, they faced the oversea shift of their domestic customers. Thus, currently, some of them are strongly required to enter foreign market for their business continuity. On the contrary, the internationalization process of Japanese SMEs manufacturers remains poorly understood. Therefore, in this paper, we tackle this puzzle with exploratory approach from the viewpoints of some entrepreneurial concepts.
　In Yamamoto and Natori (2014), we focus on international entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) as the driving force to accelate internationalization of SME manufacturers. Top-managers in some of Japanese SME manufacturers have formed and increased IEO, building social network and appropriate organizational structure and made it possible to enter foreign market. Based on these findings, we built the hypothetical viewpoints to analyze the internationzaliton process of Japanese SME manufacturers.
　We theoritically attempt to extend the above hypothetical viewpoints, utilizing other entrepreneurial concepts such as export market orientation(EMO), and learning orientation(LO).EMO and LO are driven by IEO and directly related to the entrepreneurial behavours to enter foreign market. Especially, we focus on the” Market Information Collection ” as the entrepreneurial bahaviour with MEO and LO. Based on our case studies, it is shown that top-managers directly visit foreign market and customers to collect market information. Additionally, they built the appropriate organizational structure to utilize those information. From those new findings, we showed the theoritical model of internationalization process of Japanese SME manufacturers.