Abstract:

Knowledge plays an important role in firms’ internationalization process. Building on well established theories, our research studies explores the effects of Realized Absorptive Capacity (knowledge transformation and knowledge exploitation) on export performance of Portuguese small and medium enterprises (SMEs) of Portuguese footwear industry. Based on survey data from 42 firms, our empirical results indicate that knowledge exploitation and knowledge transformation have a positive and significant influence on export performance. Finally, the main limitation of this study is related to the sample size, since it was difficult to find companies willing to collaborate with this kind of research.