Global Growth Navigator: Tailored Internationalization Services for SMEs

What is this about?

The business internationalisation opportunities tool consist of 3 set of tools which together are designed to help businesses identify, evaluate, and prioritize new internationalisation opportunities systematically. It provides a structured framework for exploring growth avenues and aligning resources with high-potential opportunities.

By filling out this document, you will gain a clear understanding of the key aspects of your expansion and be ready to take actionable steps towards entering your next international market.

This specially designed tool will help your team (or your clients) create a customized internationalization strategy. As you work through the sections, you’ll define and outline the key aspects of your expansion, providing you with a thorough understanding of the steps needed to grow globally.

How to use the tools

Why are you considering international expansion?

In this section, identify the primary reasons for entering new markets. Possible motivations could include:
– Increasing customer base
– Accessing markets with favorable regulations
– Reducing development costs

How will you measure the success of your international expansion?

Once your goal is defined, establish clear KPIs to track your progress. Use SMART indicators to set achievable objectives, such as acquiring 2000 new customers in the new market within the first year or finding 5 new distribution partners in the next three months.

In this section you have to identify a comprehensive list of new international markets where your business could expand.

First, you have to de-link from your business, technology, team, other parameters and understand the unique value proposition of your company and available resources, allowing it to evaluate what it can offer in international markets.

Value Proposition

What pains are you solving and how?
– Focus on understanding what customer problems you solve and how?
– Are the problems universal, or do they require adaptation?

What gains are you providing, and how?
– Think about the benefits that customers gain from your product or service.

Resources
– Consider financial, human, and government resources available for international expansion.
– Do you have a dedicated international team or financial backing?
– Is there government support for internationalization to particular markets?

Market-entry Enablers
– Easy Customization: Can your product or service easily adapt to international demands?
– Existing Partnerships: Do you have partnerships or distribution networks that will ease market entry?

Secondly, after identifying internal strengths in De-Linking, the next step is to Re-link and match those with the criteria for new markets. Here, you have to list the criteria your ideal target market should meet, adjusting them based on your company’s needs. And afterwards connect your strengths, market criterias with specific markets that fully or partly align with these factors. You can identify these markets by considering various factors, such as geography, market segment (B2B vs. B2C), sector, type of distribution, and other relevant aspects.

Once the De-Linking and Re-Linking steps are complete, the next steps in the process would involve prioritizing these markets based on the Attractiveness Map (assessing the market’s potential and barriers) and creating an Agility Plan (evaluating the company’s ability to enter these markets).

Attractiveness Map

Each market opportunity of the company is subjected to certain facilitating factors and barriers at the same time. It is important to recognize and analyze these different factors, as they impact how effectively the company can implement its business model. When expanding to other markets, it is crucial to reevaluate and understand how your business model, technology, product or service could be adapted to different circumstances, taking into account the specific facilitating factors and barriers present in each new market.

Assess each international market for:

Potential: competetive advantage, flexibility, efficiency, economic viability.
Barriers: duration, expenses, time to revenue, external risks.

Agility Map

This step helps you to understand on which market opportunity you should be focused on, and which should be left as a backup plan. After evaluating all market opportunities on Attractiveness Map, pick the one that has the biggest potential, and lowest barriers and write it in the middle (PURSUE NOW). But there are other options that you just want to keep open in which you invest a little along these lines of the real options cause markets or products are related. Also, there are other options still that you want to place and store the rest. Options that you don’t do anything about right now, but they might be valuable at some point, so you don’t want to forget about them, and you want to keep them in mind.

This step helps you to create a smart portfolio of options around this focal international market opportunity, meaning options that could be growth options (keep open), and the ones that could be backup options (place in storage).


Identify new market opportunities based on your unique capabilites

1. Identify the core abilities and how they translate into value to your customers (know-how about the process, a rare resource, special capability in manufacturing etc.)

2. Identify the criteria your ideal target market should meet, adjusting them based on your company’s needs and capabilities.

3. Connect your strengths, market criterias with specific markets that fully or partly align with these factors. You can identify these markets by considering various factors, such as geography, market segment (B2B vs. B2C), sector, type of distribution, and other relevant aspects.

You can save your progress in the tool by clicking the “Save as Draft “button at the bottom of the tool


This section deals with identifying those international market opportunities by the company which have the biggest growth potential, as well as those opportunities which can be subject to low entry barriers. Potential internationalisation agendas are then considered.

Evaluate for each type of product/service separately (repeat the whole analysis if there are more than one (main) product/service under consideration).

(Based on ‘Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance’ by Michael Porter, 1985)

Each market opportunity of the company is subjected to certain facilitating factors and barriers at the same time. It is important to recognize and analyze these different factors, as they impact how effectively the company can implement its business model. The nine business model building blocks help to define how the company carries out its business model and transfers its value proposition to its customers. However, when expanding to other markets, it is crucial to reevaluate these building blocks to understand how the model could be adapted to different circumstances, taking into account the specific facilitating factors and barriers present in each new market.

You assess the attractiveness of potential market opportunities by evaluating their value and growth potential, and challenges related to creating value in new markets identified. This tool allows you to visually depict the evaluation of your market opportunities so you can better grasp their upsides and downsides and compare them with each other. You rate each option on both dimensions, and different market opportunities are located on the map automatically. 

The attractiveness of a possible market opportunity is based on the evaluation of market potential factors (STEPS 1-2) and on the market barrier factors in capturing this value (STEPS 3-4) hence the y-axis of this map is the potential dimension and the x-axis is the barriers dimension. The rating of each opportunity on both dimensions result in its location on the map (STEP 5). Eventually, the map is divided into four main zones based on the level of potential and the level of challenge.

First and foremost, this is a learning process. It enables you to ask the most important questions before making such a critical decision. So, even if you are not sure about the exact score that you should assign to the different factors, you can rest assured that you have not missed any important consideration. Moreover, use this comprehensive checklist to figure out what are your main assumptions that still need to be validated and which action items are most appropriate to do so.

Strive to turn your hypothesis into knowledge. A learning process usually begins with hypothesis or beliefs that you have about an opportunity that you want to analyse. Yet a valid evaluation should not be based on beliefs. Try to turn your critical assumptions into knowledge as you progress through the evaluation and the scoring process. Perform desk research, and make sure to go out of the building and talk with customers and market experts to get accurate evaluation on market potential and market barrier factors.

STEP 6 helps you to understand on which market opportunity you should be focused on, and which should be left as a backup plan. After evaluating all market opportunities on STEP 5, pick the one that has the biggest potential, and lowest barriers and write it in the middle (PURSUE NOW). But there are other options that you just want to keep open in which you invest a little along these lines of the real options cause markets or products are related. Also, there are other options still that you want to place and store the rest. Options that you don’t do anything about right now, but they might be valuable at some point, so you don’t want to forget about them, and you want to keep them in mind.

This step helps you to create a smart portfolio of options around this focal opportunity, meaning options that could be growth options (keep open), and the ones that could be backup options (place in storage).

Open Miro Board in Full Screen

Service Leader

Tautvydas Pipiras

Tautvydas Pipiras

Project Expert