The entrepreneurial orientation of rapidly internationalizing SMEs and the logic of identifying export opportunities: the case of agro-industrial SMEs in Morocco.

Summary Apart from the growing interest in international entrepreneurship and organizational entrepreneurship as new avenues of reflection, academic research in both fields does not seem to place sufficient emphasis on the processes and dynamics underlying the rapid internationalization of SMEs and the formation of their entrepreneurial orientations (EO). The present research aims to propose a systemic understanding of the entrepreneurial processes of the rapidly internationalizing SME by placing the logic of identifying export opportunities at the heart of our reflection. The first part of this thesis is devoted to the theoretical foundations of the research, addressing the key concepts of our conceptual framework. The second part empirically addresses the research problem. After an initial contextualization analysis, the results of a multiple case study of six young Moroccan exporting SMEs in the agribusiness sector are presented and analyzed. The research highlights internal vectors (knowledge, experience and social capital) and external constraints (nature of the activity and characteristics of the local market) as determinants of the rapid internationalization of the SMEs studied. More importantly, two different configurations of EO are described in relation to two distinct logics of identifying export opportunities (a causal and an effectual logic).