Although received research emphasizes direct experiential knowledge as a key driver of firms’ internationalization, the role of indirect experience has been increasingly recognized in recent studies. In this paper, we extend these studies by examining the role of source and context of experiential knowledge in relation to firms’ internationalization into specific host markets, and offer a fine-grained analysis of when and how indirect experience complement or substitute direct experience. We test our hypotheses with data from 1,478 Swedish SMEs. Our results reveal that a firm can address its knowledge gaps and increase its extent of internationalization into a host market by combining direct and indirect experience, especially when they yield different types of knowledge needed for internationalization. We further show that direct and indirect experience derived from comparable contexts could substitute for each other but may also create knowledge redundancies.

尽管已有研究强调直接经验知识是公司国际化的关键驱动力，但间接经验的作用在最近的研究中越来越得到认可。在本文中，我们通过检验经验知识的来源和背景在公司国际化进入特定东道国市场中的作用来扩展这些研究，并对间接经验何时以及如何补充或替代直接经验进行细粒度分析。我们使用来自 1,478 家瑞典中小企业的数据来检验我们的假设。我们的研究结果表明，公司可以通过结合直接和间接经验来解决其知识差距并提高其国际化程度，尤其是当它们产生国际化所需的不同类型的知识时。