International Competitiveness of Russian IT Firms: Strong Rivals or Survivors at the Edge?

The competitiveness of firms from emerging markets has come increasingly to the focus of the international business research during last decades. The scholars have attempted to comprehend the foundations of their competitiveness and whether these foundations are different from those of developed market MNEs (Collinson and Rugman 2007; Luo and Tung 2007; Demirbag et al. 2009). Although literature has addressed these issues in the context of manufacturing firms from emerging economies (Jormanainen and Koveshnikov forthcoming), service sector, and in particular IT services, received significantly less attention. Indeed, only 50 academic studies for the time period of 1971–2007 were devoted to service companies (Kundu and Merchant 2008). This proves that theoretical and empirical knowledge about the patterns and determinants of international competitiveness in the service sector are still limited and the analysis of their growth potential has yet not been conducted in proper depth (Pauwels and de Ruyter 2005). Moreover, with regard to the IT services, the existing studies have been conducted on the basis of empirical evidence from Indian and Chinese firms (e.g., Narayanan and Bhat 2009), while other contexts are clearly under researched.