Business model innovation as a channeler of agility and redundancy in the international expansion of food and beverage companies

Internationalization studies have considered a broad set of factors influencing this phenomenon. Yet, the literature has not deeply addressed the role of dynamic capabilities, particularly their influence on binomial redundancy-agility (often seen as incompatible) and their relation to business model innovation in determining the degree of internationalization of companies. Consequently, this paper analyzes the central role that business model innovation (BMI) plays in connecting the effects of dynamic capabilities—redundancy and agility — with a higher international presence of firms, measured by their degree of internationalization (DOI). For this purpose, partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) has been applied to a sample of 179 organizations linked to the Spanish food and beverage (F&B) industry. The results show that BMI is an indispensable capability, acting as a channeler to benefit from the potential advantage that redundancy and agility exert on the international expansion of a company. Consequently, the work demonstrates the importance of developing a varied and deep set of dynamic capabilities when internationalization is intended to be carried out or further deployed. The approach of combining different dynamic capabilities in the study of DOI has highlighted the need to assess their effects by considering a set of them rather than individual evaluations in the context of internationalization. This not only expands the possibility of improving our knowledge of internationalization by considering other dynamic capabilities (as well as different organizational and intangible assets), but also demonstrates that dynamic capabilities theory is applicable to internationalization phenomena and contexts.