Internationalization of multinational companies in the globalized context is a popular topic in the academic world and it is also a strong concern of CEO/managers. However, this topic has not been well discussed in the academic community in Vietnam that can be contextualized in the typical transition economy. This paper is designed to explore critical success factors (CSF) of internationalization of large Vietnamese companies that have contributed major revenue from the international market. Through interviews with CEO/managers of successful companies geared toward world markets, the CSFs of internationalization have been identified and categorized into groups in which each CSF has interaction with each other, and together have combined impacts on the success of internationalization. The research results provide a conceptual framework to analyze factors affecting internationalization of large Vietnamese companies. Thank to this conceptual framework, further exploratory and/or confirmatory research can be developed to locate more success factors of internationalization. In addition, some particularly critical factors of internationalization success of Vietnamese companies are found to be useful to both CEO/ managers and policymakers. CEO/managers can benefit from the research results by concentrate their limited efforts/resources in managing these CSFs, and policymaker may design CSF-based policies to boost the internationalization of domestic companies.

The study aims to contribute to the improvement of project management in Vietnam. It focuses on developing new critical success factors (CSFs) which can be used to assess the success of project management in the country. This is a promising issue considering the rapid changes occurring within the business environment. The reason is because CSFs carry great consequences on project management issues, particularly in the context of Vietnam, which is currently experiencing many big scale projects involving both local and foreign investors. Two applications are utilised. One is to adapt the business model of Belassi and Tukel (1996) to observe the transitional and emerging economy of Vietnam. The other is to examine the data collected from a survey to examine the new CSFs which can then be used to assess the success of its projects and project management in Vietnam. The research results showed some remarkable differences between CSFs of Vietnam and foreign countries in both number of success factors and its impact levels which should be paid attention by foreign project managers/owners when doing investment and project management in Vietnam. The outcome generated can be useful to project owners/managers as well as policy makers in Vietnam’s business environment.