Explore the vast range of titles available.

In this editorial for the Special Issue on International Entrepreneurship, we interrelate key concepts about the pursuit of opportunities from the entrepreneurship and international business literatures. In doing so, we consider the assessment of opportunities as an individual-level cognitive activity, the construction of opportunity as a firm-level innovative activity and the shaping of opportunity as an institutional-level structuring activity. We then extend the discussion to explore the notion of a distributed, global ecosystem of opportunities and opportunity seekers, which we believe may provide a platform for valuable future research.

Research Summary New entrants often face uncertainty regarding how to optimally position themselves within product markets. We suggest that new entrants can use two important schemas to strategically categorize themselves to gain a competitive advantage in platform markets: category exemplars and category prototypes. Using a unique dataset of more than 83,000 new Google Play developers and more than 139,000 apps, we find that the optimally distinct entry point is at a high level of exemplar similarity and a low level of prototype similarity. We find that greater alignment of an entrant with the prototype corresponds to a weaker benefit of exemplar similarity. These findings have important implications for understanding competitive dynamics within product markets, strategic positioning at entry, and the interdependence of strategic categorization decisions. Managerial Summary Entrepreneurial startups often find it difficult to know how to optimally position their products among a large number of rivals in highly competitive platform markets. Our study suggests that these startups can draw on two reference points to help determine the optimal positioning for their products: category exemplars and category prototypes. Exemplars include the most successful products in a market category while prototypes represent the most common products in a category. Drawing on a large dataset obtained from the Google Play app store, we find that developers can substantially increase the installs of their first app by crafting an app text description that is as similar as possible to the description of a category exemplar and as different as possible from the category's prototypical description.

The adoption of digital communications, facilitated by Internet technology, has been among the most significant international business developments of the past 25 years. This article investigates the effect of these new technologies and the changing global business environment to understand how regional approaches to international market entry (IME) are changing in light of macro developments. Despite substantial resources in business practice dedicated to combining rebtional strategies in digital settings, this analysis of extant literature reveals that fewer than 3% of peer-reviewed research articles in the international marketing domain examine digital contexts. To address this gap, the authors assess 25 years of literature to provide (1) a description of the evolution of IME research; (2) a review and synthesis of pertinent literature that adopts relational, digital, and hybrid approaches to IME; (3) a taxonomy of IME strategies; and (4) directions for further research.

Research summary: Combining the concept of resource relatedness with the economic notion of sunk costs, we assess how the potential for resource redeployment affects market entry and exit by multi-business firms. If the performance of a new business falls below expectations, a diversified firm may be able to redeploy its resources back into related businesses. In effect, relatedness reduces the sunk costs associated with a new business, which facilitates exit. This, in turn, has implications for entry: By decreasing the cost of failure, the potential for redeployment justifies the undertaking of riskier entries and greater experimentation. These dynamic benefits of relatedness are distinct from standard notions of \"synergy.\" To show support for this idea, we provide a mathematical model, descriptive data, and company examples. Managerial summary: The ability to redeploy resources inside the firm reduces the cost of entry \"mistakes.\" If a new business turns out to have poor profitability, the ability to redeploy more of its resources back into the firm's other businesses allows recycling of investment and can speed up the retreat. This reduces not only the cost of exit, but also the cost of entry. Managers should therefore be more willing to experiment and take risks in developing businesses that are more related to the firm's existing businesses, whereas if redeployment is likely to be difficult, managers should be cautious about entering. New businesses should be chosen in ways that facilitate redeployment, and managers should consider the implications of redeployment when setting the performance thresholds that justify entry and exit.

Choosing the right international market entry mode is of utmost importance for an internationalizing firm. However, there is a lack of analysis concerning the decision-making process (DMP), specifically with regard to small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs). The authors study the DMP among SMEs intent on entering international markets and how it affects each firm's international market development strategy. Using six cases based in Finland and Italy, the authors develop a model of the SME DMP. Their results imply that the DMP evolves and goes through various phases. By focusing on the postentry phase, this study enhances knowledge on decision-making frameworks by linking the traditional international marketing literature related to initial entry mode with \"mainstream\" international business literature. Furthermore, the study reveals that SMEs adopting a more rational DMP are more likely to succeed in foreign markets, and consequently, it demonstrates the importance of real options reasoning as a theoretical lens for making entry mode decisions in the context of SMEs.

This article reviews and critically assesses the large and diverse literature on top management teams (TMTs) that has focused on international business (IB) issues. We apply an organizing framework that centers around four key elements of TMTs – TMT composition, structure, processes, and governance – and the most commonly studied IB-related choices and outcomes. This framework allows us to synthesize the contributions of the literature on TMTs in IB and identify opportunities for future research. The contributions of our review are threefold. First, we offer a roadmap for navigating the large and diverse literature on TMTs in IB. Second, we provide a systematic and critical evaluation of the key empirical and theoretical developments in this literature. Third, we highlight opportunities for future research to make theoretical and empirical advancements in each of the areas of our organizing framework. In these future research opportunities, we draw particular attention to the need to further contextualize TMT research in IB by proposing opportunities to more systematically incorporate the unique nature of the MNE and the external environment in which the MNE operates.

Categorizations emphasizing the earliness of internationalization have long been a cornerstone of international entrepreneurship research. Here we contend that the prominence of categories has not been commensurate with theory development associated with them. We draw on categorization theory to explain why earliness-based categories are persistent, and argue that a greater focus on notions related to opportunity can open new avenues of research about the entrepreneurial internationalization of business. We propose and discuss three directions for opportunity-based research on entrepreneurial internationalization, involving context, dynamics and variety.

The last quarter century has witnessed substantial growth in applications of real options theory (ROT) to international business (IB) research. In this review, we explicate the core ROT concepts in the IB context and discuss the contributions of ROT-based research to three core IB issues: timing and scale of market entry or exit, entry mode and governance form, and the role of multinational networks. Based on our review, we propose a holistic ROT view of the multinational enterprise that synthesizes the insights of existing studies. Finally, to move the field forward, we highlight key questions and challenges in current ROT-based work, provide a more precise definition of exogenous and endogenous uncertainty, suggest empirical designs to test unique ROT predictions, and explore areas where ROT can be combined with other theoretical perspectives to better understand IB phenomena.

We argue that the influence of the home country wanes as the firm increases its geographic reach. We introduce the concept of the \"home base\" to capture the effect of the set of countries in which the firm operates. We expect the dynamic liability of foreignness defined relative to the home base to be a better predictor than the static liability of foreignness defined relative to the home country. We also expect the diversity of foreign experience to increase foreign market entry. We find support for these hypotheses with data on Chinese listed firms investing abroad between 1991 and 2007.