How Chinese exporters acquire learning capability : empirical evidence from an emerging economy

There has been very little research into the relationship between a firm’s export performance and its effectiveness as a learning organization. In this chapter, the authors define export market learning as an important and distinctive capability, which enables firms to enhance their overall export performance by guiding them to formulate product adaptation strategies that accurately address the unique demands and constraints of particular host environments. As a firm internationalizes by exporting to other markets, cultivating a learning orientation as an organizational-level value, along with building systematic organizational learning routines and mechanisms can help to cultivate the firm’s export market learning capability. The authors undertook a survey of China-based exporting firms. The research found that market learning significantly mediated both the relationship between internationalization and export performance and the relationship between mechanisms for market learning and export performance. These findings have two main implications. First, internationalization induces the enhancement of export performance through the cultivation of market learning capability. Second, a set of systematic routines for market learning can help to ensure that a salient body of market knowledge is acquired and retained, which can then be used to guide product adaptation and positioning decisions that are appropriate for particular export markets, thereby constituting an enduring competence.