Next Monday, 9 February 2026, at 3:30 p.m., in the Ignacio Villalonga Room (1st floor of the Faculty of Economics), David Carnicer Sospedra, a student in the Doctoral Programme in Business Management and member of the STEER team, will present his doctoral thesis.

Thesis title:
Determinants of the potential of generative artificial intelligence in international business management: an application to the management of liability of foreignness.

Supervisor:
Dr Alejandro Escribá Esteve.

Examination board:

  • Chair: Dr José Carlos Casillas Bueno (University of Seville).
  • Secretary: Dr Ana Botella Andreu (University of Valencia).
  • Member: Dr José Fernando López Muñoz (ESIC Business & Marketing School).

Brief summary of the thesis:

This thesis analyses how managers of industrial SMEs adopt and use generative artificial intelligence in their internationalisation processes to address the Liability of Foreignness (LOF). The study identifies and explains the processes of technology appropriation as a configurational phenomenon that integrates perceptions of value, attitudes towards technology and effective learning.

The research is based on a qualitative study of four Spanish industrial SMEs engaged in internationalisation processes. A total of 519 empirical records of managers’ interactions with generative artificial intelligence are analysed using a combination of qualitative coding, text mining and clustering techniques (K-means) with semantic validation.

The analysis identified six styles of appropriation: Adaptive Strategist, Structured Technician, Pragmatic Instrumentalist, Collaborative Learner, Critical-Constructive, and Uncritical Technocentric. The results show that AI appropriation does not follow a single pattern, but rather emerges from the interaction between individual and organisational factors, contingent on the CAGE distance profile of international markets. In addition, different maturity trajectories are identified, from operational to strategic uses, mediated by control, legitimacy and internal collaboration.