Markus M. Kvarnlöf

Business Internationalization: a Quantitative Tool for Infrastructural Assessment Markus M. Kvarnlöf

Traditional theories, models, and methods within the business literature often address a general view of the environment including sociocultural, technological, political, and economic factors. However, there is a lack of infrastructural attention in these concepts which this paper intends to contribute with by analyzing how regional specific infrastructural variables can be aggregated to one comparative measure and what that measure's scope of use could be in the market analysis. In this paper, infrastructural data are compiled and calculated in a manner which allows an indexing which is presented as an Infrastructural Status Index (InfraStat Index). The contributions of this index are that it is a complementary part of the company's environmental assessment, such as their PEST- and SWOT-analyses, and a supporting quantitative tool in their strategic planning processes. However, the index has both business and macroeconomic scopes of use and the authors intend to demonstrate the benefits in both fields. The main target groups of this paper are academics within the fields of business and macroeconomics and practitioners who are, or are about, to internationalize their businesses.