Steps to internationalisation and MULTISENSOR’s role

Companies who export have more chances to endure, to establish stable growth prospects, and to have higher profitability than enterprises who do not. In the following we give you an overview of steps needed to start or consolidate an internationalisation process and show how MULTISENSOR will be able to assist in this process.

Initially, you need to assess the export readiness and potential of your company and product. Firstly, there is the need to consider your domestic competitiveness position, the relation you have with your current costumers as well as the preparation of the staff and management to start looking abroad. Ideally, the company should have a website and a catalogue of their products or services in order to have visibility and selling potential right from the start.

Moreover, the product or service that we want to commercialise has to be at the centre of our export potential considerations. Many factors come into place but, essentially, we have to analyse the feasibility to export it and think if there have to be some variations to it in order to commercialise it in other countries. In all, a SWOT analysis – in which we define our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats – of both the company and the product/s can be a proper strategy prior to selecting the markets and elaborating an internationalisation plan. MULTISENSOR aims at supporting this process by making the search for competitors and competing products in other markets a lot easier. Main components in this will be a strong and focused crawler as well as as a good analytics process.

Once we know that starting to export constitutes a good opportunity, we need to begin a market research to identify where to initiate the commercialisation. For doing that, much information of different nature has to be analysed and processed. For instance, a diversity of economic indicators both from country and sector are to be considered. Depending on the product that we want to export, we will have to look at different aspect of the countries or regions we want to address: easiness of doing business, cultural characteristics, demographics or climate can affect our decision. Furthermore, market trends, news and disruptions, and particularly possible competitors have to be included in the equation. MULTISENSOR will be of good help in this step by allowing for quick translations from different languages to your target language, but also by making the data easily comparable by using a clear interface do display the findings.

Additionally, country legislation and specific product regulations are also crucial when it comes to selecting the targeted market. The possibilities of product distribution can also affect market selection. Accessing market studies and research for different countries or areas, will be of great help to make a more informed decision. MULTISENSOR will try to integrate as much of this information as possible in its data repository, but the difficulty in this is to get access to the relevant information as much of it is not openly accessible.
Once we have analysed our international potential with the help of the software and defined our possible targeted markets, it is important to define a business plan for internationalisation. Planning our actions is essential to succeed. We need to outline the directions of our commercialisation and make a proposition for each target market. Indeed, we also need to first define our financial investment to reduce our risks and make better decisions when the operations begin.

In all, starting an internationalisation process requires meticulous planning, persistence and making informed decisions to increase our success chances. One of MULTISENSOR’s objectives is to ease this process by offering supporting the market identification process. The online platform aims at gathering a variety of indicators, market trends and news that will reduce burdens especially for SMEs and entrepreneurs. Hence, there will be significantly lower information costs to make a better decision when selecting the market we want to start exporting to.

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Photo Credit:

• Feature Image “Around the world” by Justin.Li on Flickr – Licenced under creative commons
• Picture “SWOT” by Michael Laine on Flickr – Licenced under creative commons
• Picture “werks” by Zach Stern on Flickr – Licenced under creative commons