A German family business, situated in Amberg, near Nüremberg, founded about 25 years ago, is specialized in industrial air filters. They are in various parts of the world, the USA, Mexico, Europe of course and recently in China. Herding, that’s 235 employees, a turnover of 20 million euros, 45% in export. What is interesting is the variety of ways in which they expanded internationally: licensing, subsidiaries, collaborating with a large industrial group in the USA for instance, or opening an agency, like in China recently. They've used a whole range of possibilities.

This French software company, which is a lot younger, is about 12 years old and has 250 employees. It was founded in 1990. They went international quite recently, in 1998. But it was part of their strategy right from the start; it was integrated into their product and into their business organization. You have to anticipate going international, you have to prepare yourself.

FIDIA: Fidia is situated near Turin, and is a world specialist in numerically controlled milling machines. They have been going for about 30 years. The important thing here is that the company went international very early on. The main reason for this was that they were integrated into a local environment which was already very open to the world. This case illustrates that technological innovation, local integration and international development go hand in hand, and that being international is also a state of mind.