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Since the 90’s, a high amount of studies are trying to know which are the main factors that enable some firms, called International new ventures, to accelerate their internationalization process compared to more “traditional” firms. Those traditional firms tend to follow a more gradual internationalization path as described in the Uppsala model. The objective of this thesis is to assess theoretically and empirically whether internationalization at inception is only due to a time compression effect or if there is significant differences between International new ventures and the firms that follow a gradual internationalization (regarding their structure, environment and composition of their workforces e.g.). To do so, we based our research on the EFIGE dataset, which is a firm-level database of representative samples 14759 firms (with a lower threshold of 10 employees) across European countries. In this database, we tested our model that hypothesized that the rapidity of the internationalization process of a firm was positively impacted by internal factors (product innovation and quality, research and development activities and the international experience of the managers) and external factors (the intensity of the competition and the sector in which the firm evolves). After a logistic regression, all the variables we tested seemed to have a positive impact on the speed of internationalization. Furthermore, our model successfully identified 78,5% of firms as traditional firms or international new ventures. This means that there is a significant difference between international new ventures and the traditional firms and not only a compression of time. This is an attempt, after all the hypothesis we read in multiple articles for our literature review, to create an integrative model regrouping all the factors that were plausible to have a positive impact on the speed of internationalization of international new ventures. Master [120] en sciences de gestion, Université catholique de Louvain, 2015

"In this paper it is argued that the advanced technologies take part in the course and constellation of human action and that they do this with real effects, not only metaphorically. The first part starts with the search for a useful concept of agency that enables the researcher to describe and classify all activities that contribute to the performance of an action. The concept shall include different levels of human agency as well as different levels of technologies in action. The following chapter treats the consequences that these activations of technologies have for the human-technology-relation. If technologies change their role from passive means into agents and mediators, then the narrow concept of instrumental action should be replaced by a broader concept of inter-agency. This part of the paper culminates in the presentation of a gradual model of agency that can be used to describe and discriminate between different levels and grades of action without any regard to the ontological status of the acting unit, may it be human-like or machine-like. In the second part of the paper the question 'What is the adequate unit of action?' is answered. It starts with a thought experiment about the question: Who is really flying the Airbus? We learn from both views, the humanist's and the technologist's one, that what is usually called action, like flying 240 tourists to Tenerife airport, consists of many distributed actions that have to be coordinated by social organization or technical configuration. The concept of distributed agency is spelled out during three steps: It presupposes many loci of agency, not one actor. It declares the hybrid constellations made of the mixed human and material agencies to the adequate research unit, neither the homogeneous social organizations nor the technical configurations. Finally, a third mode of integration called 'framed interactivity' is elaborated that may emerge between the hierarchical mode of master-slave-relation and the open mode of autonomous systems." (excerpt)