This article consists of five complementary parts. The Introduction portrays the increasing challenges of entrepreneurial internationalization encountered by smaller and younger firms facing highly competitive, difficult, and near-crisis environments. The literature review of the extant internationalization theories, in five related streams, will examine each stream’s benefits, contribution, and difficulties from the evolving perspective of an internationalizing enterprise over the span of its life-cycle, ranging from embryonic to growth and maturing stages. Based on the current and prevailing experience, a longitudinally integrated internationalization framework addressing different aspects evolving over the firm’s life-cycle stages is proposed and its necessary building blocks are discussed. A critical examination of the framework from the perspectives of both the received theory and ongoing practice points to its advantages and opportunity for further complementary scholarly developments beyond this article.

本文由五个互补部分组成。引言描述了面临高度竞争、困难和近乎危机的环境的小型和年轻公司在创业国际化方面面临的日益严峻的挑战。现有国际化理论的文献综述分为五个相关流派，将从国际化企业在其生命周期跨度（从萌芽到成长期和成熟阶段）的演化角度审视每个流派的好处、贡献和困难。基于当前和普遍的经验，提出了一个纵向整合的国际化框架，以解决在公司生命周期阶段演变的不同方面，并讨论了其必要的构建模块。