Beyond Organisational Scale: How Digital Micro-Entrepreneurs Build International Businesses and Challenge the Competitive Advantages of Large Corporations

For most of the twentieth century, organisational scale was treated as the main source of competitive advantage in international business. Large corporations could spread fixed costs over high volumes, finance foreign direct investment, and build distribution networks that smaller rivals could not match. This paper argues that digital technologies are loosening that logic. Drawing on the literatures on digital entrepreneurship, international new ventures, the resource-based view, dynamic capabilities and platform ecosystems, we examine how digital micro-entrepreneurs, defined as owner-operated ventures with very few employees that run their core activities through digital platforms and tools, build and sustain international businesses. We develop an integrative framework in which four digital affordances (low-cost market access, modular outsourcing, data-driven learning and community-based trust) shape three entrepreneurial capabilities (digital orchestration, rapid experimentation and network-based credibility). These capabilities, in turn, allow micro-entrepreneurs to erode specific scalebased advantages of large firms in niche and long-tail markets. We advance six propositions, discuss boundary conditions including platform dependence and institutional constraints in emerging economies, and outline a research agenda for empirical testing. The paper contributes to international entrepreneurship by shifting attention from firm size to orchestration capacity, and offers implications for micro-entrepreneurs, platform operators, financial institutions and policymakers.