The influence of industrial clusters on SMEs earliness and postentry speed: Exploring the role of innovation activities

<p dir="ltr">Despite the existing contributions on the economic and social relevance of industrial clusters in the firms' internationalization, research on these topics is still scarce and, particularly, controversial at an empirical level. This study contributes to the extant literature on international development, proposing to explore the impact that industrial clusters and innovation activities exert in the most relevant temporal dimension of the firm's foreign expansion—internationalization speed (earliness and postentry speed). Further, this research seeks to ascertain whether the relationship between industrial clusters and internationalization speed is significantly different for low and high-technology businesses. </p><p dir="ltr">Based on a sample of 3,537 Portuguese firms, collected in the SABI database, the results suggest that firms belonging to industrial clusters and developing innovation activities tend to exhibit a higher postentry speed, not observing the same impact in terms of early internationalization. The findings also reveal that low-technology firms have an additional incentive to become involved in industrial clusters, since these actions will be reflected to a greater extent in their postentry speed than those of high-technology firms.</p>