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The rise of digital technologies has led to the emergence of born digitals, which are firms distinguished by their digital business models and an early digitalization of their value chains. Despite the growing importance of these firms, their internationalization strategies, including the crucial choice of the most-suited foreign entry mode, have only been analyzed marginally by the extant literature. This paper aims to examine how born digitals select their entry mode and which context-specific modes are preferred.

By advancing the institutional entry mode approach of Meyer et al. (2009) with the digitalization conditions of the target market, the authors propose a theoretical entry mode framework for born digitals, in which the institutional market support and the digitalization degree simultaneously affect the entry mode decision.

The authors conclude with two main propositions, arguing that a joint venture and a digital entry are preferable under weak institutions and acquisitions and greenfield projects otherwise. Depending on a high digitalization degree, digital and greenfield entry modes are beneficial.

This paper contributes to the literature by creating an entry mode framework for born digitals and by introducing a digital entry mode.

We aim to explore the role of the interplay between intuition and rationality in the causation-effectuation decision-making processes of small creative businesses during their international expansion.

We developed process research to investigate the causation-effectuation decision-making processes during the internationalization of a creativity-intensive small business located in Brazil. In just three years, its cartoon reached screens in 80 countries.

We discovered an orthogonal relationship between causation and effectuation moderated by the balance between intuition and rationality, enabling small creative businesses to successfully navigate internationalization by adapting to contractual demands and exploring creative opportunities. To explain these relationships, we offer five process-based propositions for further studies.

We reconstructed the internationalization process based on retrospective interviews, so eliminating all biases from rationalization may have been impossible. We elucidate the interrelationship between causation-effectuation decision-making logic and demystify that decision-making effectuation logic is predominantly intuitive. We provide evidence that rational thinking permeates the entire decision-making process as a process of building the future.

Understanding causation-effectuation decision-making processes in creativity-intensive small businesses can be helpful for other businesses because they nurture production on a large scale.

The study emphasizes the importance of creativity-intensive small businesses to countries’ economies. Creativity-intensive businesses grow in other industries and generate many jobs in mature industries.

We demystify the decision-making assumption that effectuation logic is predominantly intuitive while causation logic is rational. Instead, we show that these logics coexist and interact orthogonally and dynamically.