• International Commerce and Information Review
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.55-79
• /
• 2012

The previous studies based on a resource-based view of firm highlighted the role of resources within a firm in creating and sustaining competitive advantage. Recent research, however, the relational view points to the importance of inter-firm sources(or relational capital) in creating firm competitiveness. In international business field, the studies on born-global firms also states that when firms are lack of ownership-specific advantages in their internationalization process, they resort to the external partners and social networks to complement their resource scarcity. By adopting the relational view and born-global firms concept, a network-based approach needs to be applied to explain the international strategy of Korean service firms. This is because most of Korean service firms own less ownership-specific advantages than global competitors. This study proposes Korean firms' global network building and exploiting strategy to enhance their international stages of development. The network, for example, Global Korean Tourism Network, enables network members access to the valuable resources and capabilities they are lack of when undergoing internationalization process. This study's contribution is along two dimension. First, even global Korean network is emerging as a major issue in recent years, we could not figure out how to build global Korean network for service firms. This studies gives an answer. Second, we derived what benefits can be gained from the network if Global Korean Tourism Network is developed for hotel, tourism, convention firms' internationalization.