International Business Review

Special Issue CALL FOR PAPERS

International Entrepreneurship and the Contemporary Global Firm

Guest Editors:                                    

Gary Knight (Atkinson Graduate School of Management, Willamette University, USA)

Zaheer Khan (School of Business, University of Aberdeen, UK)

Niina Nummela (Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Finland)

 

Submission Deadline: 1 July 2023

 

We invite you to submit a paper to the Special Issue of International Business Review (IBR) on International Entrepreneurship (IE), which coincides with the 30-year and 20-year anniversaries, respectively, of publication of seminal works by Oviatt and McDougall (1994) and Knight and Cavusgil (2004) in this area. IE emphasizes proactive, innovative, and risk-seeking behaviors aimed at creatively discovering and exploiting opportunities internationally in pursuit of performance advantages (McDougall & Oviatt, 2000). For example, IE can refer to ‘born globals’ and ‘international new ventures’ (INVs) (e.g., Autio, 2005; Knight & Cavusgil, 2004; Oviatt and McDougall, 1994), a category of firms characterized by early or rapid internationalization.
            Expanding abroad early and rapidly is a significant and fascinating exception in company internationalization because, historically, most firms initiated international business (IB) substantially after their founding, often decades later (Coviello et al, 2017; Jones & Coviello, 2005). Firms that internationalize early and/or rapidly are usually characterized by a paucity of tangible and financial resources (Knight & Cavusgil, 2004),  resulting in the liabilities of small size, youth (e.g., inexperience), and foreignness, and the need to develop and apply distinctive performance-enhancing resources, capabilities, and strategies when they expand abroad (e.g., Jantunen et al, 2008). Research indicates that many such firms exhibit flexibility, international entrepreneurial orientation, learning orientation, and superior international marketing capabilities (e.g., Cavusgil & Knight, 2015; Chandra, Styles, & Wilkinson, 2012; Khan & Lew, 2018).
            IE encompasses young entrepreneurial ventures as well as managers in large, established firms who behave like entrepreneurs to launch international ventures (a phenomenon known as ‘corporate entrepreneurship’ or ‘intrapreneurship’) (McDougall & Oviatt, 2000). Firms undertake corporate entrepreneurship to develop new businesses, products or processes inside existing organizations to create value and generate new revenue. Corporate entrepreneurship can energize older organizations by fostering culture, resources, and processes that motivate, support, and engage the firm in entrepreneurial thinking and action. The established firm may develop an idea internally, and then build a startup inside the firms. Or the firm may identify an early-stage startup to acquire or collaborate with, and potentially assimilate into the larger organization.
            Scholars also have examined IE as the cross-national exploration, discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities to create future goods and services (Mainela et al, 2014; Oviatt & McDougall, 2005). Exploration is searching abroad to discover new opportunities, and implies discovery, risk-taking, innovation, and experimentation. Exploitation implies taking advantage of existing opportunities, and developing and executing needed strategies and actions. Capabilities related to both exploration and exploitation support achieving superior international performance.
            Firms that undertake IE are affected by national phenomena, such as economic, institutional, and sociocultural factors. Individual entrepreneurs and managers may be influenced by cognitive, emotional, and physical factors (Miller & Breton-Miller, 2017), alongside the risk, uncertainly, and complexity that characterize international expansion.
            A growing number of firms adopt transnational entrepreneurship, leveraging the global mobility of people. Transnational entrepreneurs may rely on social and economic resources based in more than one country (Lundberg & Rehnfors, 2018). The category includes international entrepreneurs, migrant entrepreneurs, ethnic entrepreneurs, and returnee entrepreneurs (Drori, Honig, & Wright, 2009; Czinkota, Khan, & Knight, 2021). Migrants launch international ventures, targeting their home countries and other international markets. Migrant entrepreneurs bring to host nations social networks, experience, bridges to foreign investors, and other assets and resources. Interestingly, many of these entrepreneurs are able to overcome the liabilities of underdeveloped home markets, immature institutions, resource poverty, and other challenges (Dabić et al, 2020; Elo et al, 2018). Research is needed on such ‘challenge-based entrepreneurship’, including early and mature stages of growth (e.g., Miller & Breton-Miller, 2017, Rodgers et al., 2022). Other emerging topics relevant to IE include corporate political activity, social responsibility and sustainability (e.g., Rodgers et al., 2019; Shepherd & Patzelt, 2011), as well as social entrepreneurship, which seeks solutions for poverty and other social problems (cf. Zahra et al., 2014; Zucchella, 2021).
            The Internet and emerging technologies (e.g., blockchain, digital platforms, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence) are essential elements of IE (Nambisan, Zahra, & Luo, 2019; Walton, 2022). Technology is known to (i) broadly support IE, and (ii) actualize novel international opportunities for firms that operate via digital platforms and ecosystems (Chakravarty et al, 2021). Platforms generate value by facilitating low-cost third-party transactions at scale (e.g., Airbnb, Uber), attracting many buyers and sellers. Digital processes reduce spatial and temporal boundaries and facilitate IE (cf. Monaghan et al., 2020), including the rapid internationalization of firms from emerging and developing economies. Digital platform firms and companies in the services sector undertake early and rapid internationalization as they internationalize via the Internet. In addition, recent research has examined the role of digital platforms in crowdfunding — large-scale online fundraising from many sources for projects or ventures (e.g., Ahsan & Musteen, 2021).
            The literature on IE remains fragmented, with substantial gaps in content, theory, and methodology (e.g., Reuber et al, 2017). Event studies, ethnography, mixed-methods research, experimental designs, and other rarely applied methodologies can help move the field forward (e.g., Eden et al., 2022; Nummela, 2014; Zellmer-Bruhn et al., 2016). Research is also needed that leverages theoretical perspectives that have been little employed in IE — for example, the integration-responsiveness framework (e.g., Roth & Morrison, 1990), the organizational life-cycle approach (e.g., Dodge, Fullerton, & Robbins, 1994), the effectuation view (e.g., Sarasvathy, 2001; Sarasvathy et al, 2014), and the legitimacy view (e.g., Kostova & Zaheer, 1999). Other potential theoretical perspectives include the knowledge-based view, capabilities view, resource dependency view, business models view, strategic choice theory, strategic ambidexterity, agency theory, network theory, social capital theory, institutional theory, culture explanations, and numerous others.
            Markets and institutions are evolving. Recent exogenous factors — e.g., protectionism, populism, deglobalization, and sanctions — are affecting the landscape of internationalization and firms’ survival and growth. The liabilities of foreignness and local competition remain powerful hurdles in company internationalization. The Covid-19 pandemic has created additional pressures on internationally entrepreneurial firms (Amankwah-Amoah et al., 2021). Research is needed on how firms leverage IE to navigate external shocks and adapt their business models. 

Potential Topics for Submissions
This Special Issue welcomes both theoretical and empirical papers. Appropriate topics for submissions include, but are not limited to the following.

— Integration of the literature on entrepreneurship and IB. How can ‘entrepreneurship’ perspectives (e.g., behavioral models like bricolage and improvisation) inform IE? How do IB perspectives (e.g., the eclectic paradigm) inform IE?

— Novel theoretical perspectives to explain IE, including the post-entry performance of entrepreneurial firms

— Factors that give rise to early and rapid internationalization

— Role of resources, capabilities, and/or dynamic capabilities in IE, and in born globals and INVs

— Factors that allow born globals and INVs to supersede the advantages of large MNEs

— Processes required for early and rapid internationalization, such as scaling operations up and down

— Multi-level research incorporating diverse units of analysis — individuals, teams, organizations (including non-governmental organizations and nonprofits), networks, platforms, nascent industries, sectors (including products and services), ecosystems, and nations

— Characteristics and antecedents of value creation and capture in IE

— Home- and host-country environments, including cultural and institutional environments, as well as industrial clusters and ecosystems

— Characteristics of opportunity exploration and exploitation in IE. For example, how do opportunities emerge or reveal themselves in IE? How can scholars leverage the opportunities literature to inform IE?

— Emergent factors in the global external environment and their effect on early/rapid internationalization, born globals, and INVs

— IE arising in or from emerging markets and by challenge-based entrepreneurs

— Born global and INV navigation of regulatory uncertainty through non-market strategies

— IE as corporate entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship in a global context

— Implications of emergent, novel trends in globalization and ‘deglobalization’ for IE

— The role of emergent or ‘fourth industrial revolution’ technologies, including digital platforms and ecosystems. For example, how do digital platforms affect the liabilities of size and foreignness in entrepreneurial internationalization and post-entry survival?

— The contrast between traditional views on born globals and INVs that leverage firm-specific advantages, versus digital firms that emphasize external resources and ‘ecosystem-specific advantages’ (e.g., Li et al, 2019).

— Transnational entrepreneurship and the global mobility of people, including international entrepreneurs, migrant entrepreneurs, ethnic entrepreneurs, and returnee entrepreneurs.

— The role of corporate political activity, social responsibility and sustainability in IE and international performance.

— The role of public policy in supporting early internationalization and superior international performance in IE.

— The future of born globals and INVs. How do such firms evolve over time?

The deadline for submission is July 1, 2023. The submission of the manuscripts will be through the IBR online submission system (https://www.editorialmanager.com/ibr) from 1 June until 1 July 2023 only. They should follow the IBR guidelines available at: https://www.elsevier.com/journals/international-business-review/0969-5931/guide-for-authors. Please ensure you submit your paper for this Special Issue by ticking the appropriate box at the above site. Papers will be double-blind reviewed, following the IBR review procedure.

For additional information, contact one of the Special Issue guest editors:
Gary Knight, [log in to unmask]
Zaheer Khan, [log in to unmask]
Niina Nummela, [log in to unmask]

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Ahsan, M. & Musteen, M. (2021). International opportunity development on crowdfunding platforms: A spatial, temporal, and structural framework, International Business Review, 30(6), 101912.

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