Published Paper Details:

Traditionally Exporting has been seen as a way to increase turnover of individual enterprises when Internationalization of SMEs begins with. Exporting, as the traditional way to internationalize, is still very important, but during the last decade, internationalization has become a much more differentiated business activity of crucial importance for achieving competitiveness. Foreign partnerships, foreign investments, subsidiaries and cross border clustering represent viable ways to facilitate exchanges of knowledge and technology and to strengthen international business strategies of SMEs. Such international activities cover both outward (e.g. sales/export) and inward (e.g. import or access to knowledge) activities along the value chain. Exporting firms are also often involved in a range of inward and related activities that interact with each other. The role of management in technological advancements, quality related with product manufacturing, process capability, application of operational knowledge of the staff, lived in abroad and having people with foreign experience will increase the pace of internationalization. This paper underlines that internationalization consists of a broad range of activities that contribute to the development of enterprises' competitiveness. Competitiveness is the role which can be developed by the management. However, this holistic approach has not been adopted sufficiently by policy measures aiming to encourage internationalization and at increasing firms' competitiveness. Statistical approaches such as, Factor analysis, multiple regression, Man whitney U test and correlation are used for finding the results through SPSS software.