By: Severi Suomala
Published 17.4.2026
Which market? Good question. Now slow down.
You have identified a market. Maybe it was Germany because a trade fair contact opened a door. Maybe it was Sweden because the language barrier feels manageable. Either way, the market question is the right place to start. What happens next is where most internationalization efforts begin to fail.
The instinct after answering “which market?” is to move. Sign the agreement, brief the team, book the flights. The market has been chosen, so the work can begin. What rarely happens in that moment is an explicit examination of what the company actually knows about that market, what it is assuming, and what it has not yet defined.
At Bothnia Seven, Step 1 exists for exactly this reason. The market is already on the table. The question is whether the company has a defensible commercial foundation to act on it.
Two concepts that get confused
Frank Knight drew a distinction in 1921 that still has direct operational relevance. Risk is measurable. It can be calculated, priced, and managed. Uncertainty is something else. It is the condition in which the information required to calculate probabilities does not yet exist (Rakow 2010).
Once a market has been identified, a company faces both. Some unknowns are reducible through analysis. Others are structural. They cannot be resolved before entering the market.
Müllner (2016) shows that treating these categories as interchangeable leads to systematically flawed market entry decisions. When uncertainty is framed as risk, companies overestimate what they understand and underestimate what remains undefined.
Step 1 forces that distinction to be made explicitly. Before any resource is committed, each critical assumption must be classified: is this something we can know, or something we will only learn by acting?
Why examined clarity is not the same as speed
The Uppsala model places knowledge accumulation at the centre of internationalization. The revised model identifies the root of uncertainty as outsidership. A company that lacks a position in the relevant market network faces genuine uncertainty regardless of prior experience (Johanson & Vahlne 2009).
This has a practical implication. Market selection alone does not create readiness. Network position plays a central role.
Vahlne (2020) further develops this logic. Superior performance in international markets comes from acting under uncertainty while keeping risk at an acceptable level. This requires clarity about what is known and what is not.
Oviatt and McDougall (1994) and Cavusgil and Knight (2009) describe firms that internationalize rapidly from inception. In practice, these cases reflect situations where founders already possess relevant knowledge, networks, or context that reduce uncertainty at the starting point. Speed follows clarity in these situations.
A company that moves quickly from an unexamined position is not acting on insight. It is acting on assumption.
The question after choosing a market is therefore not how fast to move. It is whether the starting position has been made explicit enough to support the first irreversible decision.
Why the assessment rarely happens
If the logic is this clear, why is it so rarely applied?
Kocoglu and Mithani (2024) show that foreign market entry decisions are consistently distorted by cognitive biases after the market has already been selected. Overconfidence leads decision-makers to underestimate capability gaps. Anchoring ties judgment to previous markets that may not be comparable. Confirmation bias filters out disconfirming information.
Faroque et al. (2026) describe the experience gap paradox. Decision-makers rely on prior experience that feels relevant but does not match the specific context of the target market. Experience fills the gaps where knowledge is missing. It presents itself as judgment, but functions as substitution.
Schweizer and Vahlne (2022) show that internationalization decisions are shaped by firm-level processes and individual cognitive and emotional triggers that formal models do not capture.
In practice, this leads to a familiar pattern. A coherent plan, built on plausible assumptions, encounters friction: a procurement process that behaves differently than expected, a customer segment that does not respond, or a competitive dynamic that was invisible from the outside.
At that point, the problem is not execution. The problem is that the assumptions driving the plan were never made explicit before commitment.
What this looks like in practice
This pattern is not theoretical. It appears repeatedly in real market entries.
Walmart’s entry into Germany is one of the most cited examples. The company entered the market without sufficiently understanding how local regulation, culture, and customer behavior would affect its operating model. Analyses of the case show that practices developed in the United States were transferred directly into a market where they did not fit. This included management approaches, employee practices, and customer interaction models. The result was sustained losses and eventual exit (Hamza & Nizam 2016; Shurrab 2014).
The same mechanism appears differently in successful expansions. Starbucks’ international growth, including its expansion into China, reflects a more deliberate approach. The company combined early entry with localization, partnerships, and gradual scaling. Its model evolved as market understanding improved, allowing it to build a strong position despite increasing competition and structural challenges (Wang 2023).
The difference is not whether uncertainty exists. It is when and how it is addressed. In one case, assumptions remain implicit until they fail. In the other, they are tested and adjusted as part of the expansion process.
In practice, companies either examine uncertainty before committing, or they pay for it later.
What Step 1 actually produces
Standard advisory work tends to move directly from market selection to recommendations. The gap between those two points is where most errors are introduced. It is typically filled with confidence rather than evidence.
Step 1 is designed to remove that gap.
It is a disciplined effort to answer one question:
Do we have sufficient clarity to make the first decision now?
This is not a research project. It is a decision exercise.
It requires mapping what is genuinely known against what is currently assumed. It requires identifying the information gaps that would change the direction of the work if they were resolved. It requires making critical risks explicit, rather than embedding them in presentation language.
In practice, much of this work is done through direct interaction with the market itself. Conversations with potential customers, partners, and stakeholders are used to test assumptions and expose gaps that internal analysis alone does not reveal.
The output is not a report. It is a decision-grade view of the starting position, agreed upon before any channel is evaluated, any partner is approached, or any resource is committed.
You cannot manage what you have not yet named.
Step 1 as the foundation of Seven Steps
Seven Steps is not a timeline. It is a decision framework.
Each subsequent step depends on the clarity produced in Step 1.
Market comparison only works if the evaluation criteria reflect the company’s actual constraints.
Focus only works if the starting position supports a realistic first result.
Value proposition only works if it is grounded in real customer context, not transferred assumptions.
Commercial model only works if resource constraints and risk tolerance are explicit.
The decision point is only meaningful if it is based on examined evidence.
The living plan only works if the original assumptions are visible and traceable.
Step 1 is therefore not the first phase of work. It is the condition that makes the rest of the framework valid.
The question that drives Step 1
Do we have sufficient clarity to make the first decision now?
If the answer is yes, the work moves forward with a defensible foundation.
If the answer is no, the work begins there.
Either way, nothing that follows is built on assumptions that have not been examined.
That is what it means to stay seven steps ahead.
References
Cavusgil, S.T. & Knight, G. 2009. Born Global Firms: A New International Enterprise. Business Expert Press. New York.
Faroque, A.R., Casulli, L., Kuivalainen, O. & Sundqvist, S. 2026. Bridging the experience gap: cognitive biases and heuristics in the internationalization of small firms. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 32(11), 1–25. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-09-2024-0993 [Accessed 2 April 2026].
Hamza, S. & Nizam, I. 2016. Why Walmart fails in Germany? An analysis in the perspective of organizational behaviour. International Journal of Accounting & Business Management, 4(2), 206–215. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316790636 [Accessed 2 April 2026].
Johanson, J. & Vahlne, J.-E. 2009. The Uppsala internationalization process model revisited: From liability of foreignness to liability of outsidership. Journal of International Business Studies, 40(9), 1411–1431. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2009.24 [Accessed 2 April 2026].
Kocoglu, I. & Mithani, M.A. 2024. How do managerial biases affect foreign market entry decisions? AIB Insights, 24(4). Available at: https://doi.org/10.46697/001c.123988 [Accessed 11 April 2026].
Müllner, J. 2016. From uncertainty to risk: A risk management framework for market entry. Journal of World Business, 51(5), 800–814. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2016.07.011 [Accessed 11 April 2026].
Oviatt, B.M. & McDougall, P.P. 1994. Toward a theory of international new ventures. Journal of International Business Studies, 25(1), 45–64. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8490193 [Accessed 5 April 2026].
Rakow, T. 2010. Risk, uncertainty and prophet: The psychological insights of Frank H. Knight. Judgment and Decision Making, 5(6), 458–466. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1930297500001303 [Accessed 6 April 2026].
Schweizer, R. & Vahlne, J.-E. 2022. Non-linear internationalization and the Uppsala model: On the importance of individuals. Journal of Business Research, 140, 583–592. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.11.025 [Accessed 2 April 2026].
Shurrab, H. 2014. Wal-Mart’s German Misadventure. Case study. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265849190 [Accessed 11 April 2026].
Vahlne, J.-E. 2020. Development of the Uppsala model of internationalization process: From internationalization to evolution. Global Strategy Journal, 10(2), 239–250. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/gsj.1375 [Accessed 2 April 2026].
Wang, Z. 2023. Analysis of Starbucks in China. BCP Business & Management, 38, 592–597. Available at: https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/aemps/article/view/3152 [Accessed 11 April 2026].