Hydropower Project Ventures: Testing International Waters

Abstract

A vanguard project is an effective mechanism for testing new opportunities to deploy existing technologies into new markets in an effort to realize growth. Typically such endeavors are motivated by organizational needs to generate new knowledge and learning to develop or renew existing capabilities of the firm. In the case of Norwegian independent power producers (IPP), a recent trend to achieve company level growth is by expanding hydropower operations into international markets thus testing theoretical foundations of vanguard projects. Whilst many other European IPPs have internationalized stepwise in a pan-European context, Norwegian IPPs have chosen to pursue non-core European markets for international expansion. This paper serves to underscore the innovative globalization strategy shifts amongst Norwegian IPP by underpinning the challenges and opportunities of these activities in developing and emerging countries. To achieve this research objective triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data is utilized. Primary qualitative data includes exploratory case studies at the firm level, whereas quantitative data includes a national survey amongst Norwegian IPPs. Theoretical considerations lie within how such vanguard projects allow for core business activities to persist by diversifying geographically into dissimilar markets. The result of this research stream identifies the degree to which Norwegian IPP actors are actively developing such vanguard projects in which geographic locales of emerging markets. The mixed method approach results delineate how Norwegian IPPs are internationalizing and what the managerial implications are for entrepreneurs and IPPs alike.