International Expansion and Causality

After growth, what’s next?

Assessing a country is no small task. It can be overwhelming. Assuming we’ve established a country’s growth characteristic, what is the next metric or measure?

To guide our choices, we’re going to employ two tools: A framework and a prioritization.

The outcome is that we will know which factors matter most to international expansion.

Frameworks for international expansion are not new. Francis Aguilar, a Harvard Business School professor, published the PEST analysis in the 1960s in his book “Scanning the Business Landscape. It was later expanded to PESTLE: Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Environmental and Legal.

But if you follow or “fill in” the framework above, does that do anything more than raise awareness of each of the factors within a country?

Mapping the landscape is important. But like any map, it doesn’t tell you which direction to take. For that, you need a destination.

The framework we’re going to use has one crucial difference -- it is grounded in data.

But data alone doesn’t help us. Instead, understanding the relationship between the data and a decision or action is what is truly useful.

When we are talking about the relationship between data and making decisions, there is one relationship that rules all others: Causality.