Global Entrepreneurship: Past, Present & Future: Volume 29

Organizational learning and the learning-based view of the firm have become popular topics in international business. Despite their popularity, limited attention has been devoted to examination of the organizational and managerial implications to international business. In this chapter is a discussion of how organizational learning impacts alliances and international joint ventures in emerging economies and also in portfolios of alliances. The chapter concludes with a discussion of issues that deserve future empirical and theoretical examinations.

In this chapter, I highlight Marjorie Lyles’s contribution to the field of international management. Rather than attempting to present a comprehensive overview of her scientific career, I focus on three areas of her scholarship that I believe have influenced the direction of research in the field. First, I discuss her contributions to the study of organizational learning, both in terms of theory and empirics. Second, I provide an overview of the impact of her pioneering research on knowledge transfer in emerging economies. Third, I summarize her influence on the management profession.

Thanks to the work of Marjorie A. Lyles, we have a clearer understanding about how organizations learn and utilize knowledge, especially in the context of international partnerships. I suggest that her strong impact on the intersection of international business, international management, and strategy, which extends beyond her path-breaking research, can be considered under the categories of learning, collaboration, and context and place.

In this chapter, we explore the effect of export exit on subsequent firm performance in a sample of 13,629 Belgian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We find that firms that stop exporting have lower profitability and profitability declines even further after they exit foreign markets. Firms that were highly dependent on revenues from exports and firms exiting multiple markets are more negatively affected, as reflected in lower post-exit survival rates and profitability. However, export duration or exiting institutionally distant markets does not have a significant impact on subsequent firm performance. Finally, although firm performance is negatively affected by exit, failed internationalization does not always lead to firm failure. Theoretical and practitioner implications are discussed.

To date there is little understanding of the factors that impact the survival of foreign IPOs after they list on US stock exchanges. In this study, we examine how foreign IPO survival is contingent on institutional factors associated with the firm’s home country. We also explore how corporate governance and organizational identity influence the survival of foreign IPOs in the United States. Results suggest that the US institutional environment supports foreign firms with more independent and professional leadership, and that knowledge-intense organizations have higher chances of long-term success after listing on US exchanges.

The literature on global value chains and global production networks suggests limited entrepreneurial opportunities for small firms from developing countries. However, in networks power can accrue not only to central players (such as lead firms), but also to “marginal” players that can play a brokering role. Brokers get their power from connecting parties that would otherwise not be connected and firms that can bridge structural holes may well have impact beyond what would be suggested by their size. This chapter theorizes and provides evidence for global entrepreneurship through brokerage; when entrepreneurs recognize business opportunities in one context, can identify resources from another context, and can connect the two. Global entrepreneurship through brokerage can take place any time when entrepreneurs see opportunities that can be brokered between any two countries, but it takes a specific form in developing countries. A global entrepreneur can earn rents by bridging the gap between the resources of developed countries and the opportunities in emerging markets. This study examines a South African company providing low-cost housing with funds from socially responsible institutional investors, mainly from North America. The very different institutional conditions of the two contexts facilitate an understanding of how this type of entrepreneurship takes place.

Entrepreneurship is a social role, suggesting that different communities and societies will hold different typical expectations for who the entrepreneur should be (i.e., personal characteristics) and how an entrepreneur acts (behaviors). In this chapter, we describe the results of two studies that elucidate the content of the entrepreneur’s role and assess its generalizability and cultural uniqueness in three cultures: the United States, China, and Taiwan. We do so by examining the prototypes, or culturally shared implicit theories or schema that individuals hold about the attributes and behaviors characterizing the entrepreneur’s role. We suggest that the entrepreneur prototype has overlapping content across these three cultures, and that they also reflect cultural uniqueness due to different political, economic, and social histories and conditions. First, we conducted an initial inductive study designed to elicit a comprehensive list of representative characteristics and behaviors that are commonly recognized in each society as typical of an “entrepreneur,” resulting in an inclusive list of 87 prototypical/anti-prototypical items. These items were subsequently used in a survey-based study to assess the specific content that each culture endorses as prototypical of an entrepreneur, the extent to which those prototypes varied across the three cultures, and relationships of prototype evaluation with individuals’ personal values and exposure to entrepreneurship. Results showed that prototypes were distinct in each culture, but with some overlap of attributes, especially between China and Taiwan. Results showed some support for the relationship between top-ranked prototypical attributes and individuals’ exposure to entrepreneurship as well as openness-to-change values and conservation values, but also interesting differences in these relationships in the three cultures. The findings highlight that role prototype formation processes across these cultures were etic, but that the content of the role may well be emic or culturally specific.

This chapter focuses on the impact that private-equity financing has on nurturing and developing global entrepreneurs in emerging economies. The research question is: how do potentially high-impact entrepreneurial start-ups in emerging economies rapidly expand globally in order to compete with developed-country competitors. Oviatt’s and McDougall’s (1994, 2005) international new venture typology is used to analyze a case study of an emerging-economy, born-global start-up and its relationship with a venture capital firm, which is crucial to develop a competitive international business strategy.

In spite of operating in an emerging country lacking a well-developed entrepreneurial ecosystem (institutional void), a global start-up in conjunction with a venture capital firm that practiced a hands-on investment strategy, was able to successfully scale its business model globally over a 10-year period. The venture capital firm played a critical role in providing institutional support, lacking in this emerging country, to enable the start-up to quickly grow and become competitive with Western competitors.

It is well known that entrepreneurs possess human, political and social capital that allow them to be successful. While we know that each of these “capitals” possess value, we know much less about how they interact – for example, are they substitutes or complements? – and whether where the capital was acquired matters. The latter point is particularly Germaine to the issue of global entrepreneurship and the importance of returnee entrepreneurs for economic development. We provide an overview of this research to date and call for an agenda that concentrates more on the total value a portfolio of these capitals generates and on how that capital is acquired both at home and overseas.

Entrepreneurial activity is currently a primary concern of many developed economies that struggle with changes in their industrial structures. Many of the traditionally strong industries are encountering strong global competition and declining markets, and national competitiveness is often said to be built on new entrepreneurial firms that are able to grow in global markets. The facilitating national systems for these firms are covered in the emerging start-up ecosystem discussion. This chapter aims to contribute to this discussion by incorporating an analysis of the variety of actors and activities needed in start-up industries that rely on competence bloc theory. Furthermore, inspired by cultural-historical activity theory, the study specifies the contextual-, temporal- and renewal-related determinants of the activity of start-up ecosystems. As a result, a framework for examining start-up ecosystems as platforms for high-growth entrepreneurship is proposed in terms of its core constituencies that influence the emergence and non-emergence of high-growth firms.

This study explains the international opportunity development of SMEs from emerging economies during institutional transition. This research enriches our understanding of how these firms adopt different approaches to developing international opportunities when they confront the turbulent institutional environment. We develop a phase-based framework for the evolution of transitional institution for SMEs’ internationalization and the SMEs’ internationalization process in that framework. By providing an empirical case study of a privately owned SME from China, the main finding is that SMEs from emerging economies become more entrepreneurial and proactive in developing the international opportunity during the institutional transition.

This study examined how government investment affects venture capital (VC) development and entrepreneurial activities. Using data from 1992 to 2012 in China, I investigated the causal impact of the government investment in VC with a natural experimentation research design. More specifically, I studied the how the onsite of a policy that allows government to invest in VC industry induces change on VC fundraising and VC investment. The results indicated that the initiation of a government investment policy could insert an immediate positive impact on VC fundraising, while it also induced a gradual significant change on the entrepreneurship financing of local start-ups.

Many clean energy ventures, particularly those in the early stage and operating in the developing world, never get off the ground because traditional sources of capital like banks tend to shy away from sectors that seem unfamiliar or too risky. As highlighted most recently in the COP21 Paris Climate Change summit in December 2015, there is a critical gap in market understanding of and limited scholarly research on the role clean energy entrepreneurship can play in addressing energy poverty and sustainable business model development in the developing world. To address these gaps, this chapter seeks to connect the theory and practice of clean energy entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa. Three issues and questions will be explored in this chapter. First, what are the critical differences in terms of sustainability and entrepreneurship between industrialized OECD countries and emerging markets and developing countries? Second, what key issues and questions need to be addressed in order to design, build, and scale a clean energy entrepreneurial ecosystem in sub-Saharan Africa? Third, what is the future outlook for clean energy entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa?

Models of speed of internationalization have been built on narrowly defined resources, emphasizing the intangibles at the cost of tangibles and relying on controlled resources while overlooking nonterritorial ones. We build an integrative model for both established and unestablished firms, using three determinants of speed – global value chain experiences, resource adjusted expected return from internationalization and existence of e-commerce platforms. The first is under firms’ control while the last two are partially controlled or totally uncontrolled. Five strategies of internationalization are identified – internationalization through accelerated marketization, delayed internationalization, opportunistic (or on/off) internationalization, IB internationalization, and alliance internationalization, each associates with a different speed of internationalization.