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The case traces the genesis of NASSCOM and presents a decision situation faced by the new president who has to formulate a road map in the light of changed circumstances. NASSCOM has been an exemplary trade association. However, it faces challenges that can jeopardize the future if the industry. While the challenges do not have short term effect on the growing Indian IT-BPO industry, as the active industry ally NASSCOM's new leader has to ensure long term success of IT-BPO industry. The case can be best used to understand the IT industry dynamics through the eyes of an exemplary trade body and also understand how a trade association in emerging economies can play an important role to fill institutional voids.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of related diversification across service offerings and industry domains for professional service firms (PSFs) in emerging economies by integrating the reputational and economies of scope perspectives of diversification. The paper also provides insights into how related diversification impacts small and medium sized firms differently.

Using unique data from the Indian Information Technology industry, the authors examine the impact of related diversification along service offerings and industry domains on export performance of firms.

The results show that related diversification across specializations and industry domains impact performance differently across different firm sizes. While the authors find that related diversification across service offerings has an inverted U shape with performance for the medium sized firms, they do not impact performance for small sized firms. Performance of small firms has a U shaped relationship with relatedness in industry domains. The study shows that reputation transfer across industry domains play a significant role in the performance of small size firms whereas the ability to realize economies of scope by cross selling multiple services across clients do matter for performance of medium sized firms.

Managers of small PSFs need to expand along related industry domains whereas managers from medium sized firms can experiment across service offerings to exploit economies of scope.

The study contributes to hitherto unexamined research on related diversification in PSFs. The study is one of the few studies to examine relatedness along more than one dimension in an intra-industry context.

Extant literature suggests that post-entry internationalization strategies and performance implications of born globals are an under-researched area. This paper aims to examine the internationalization strategies of born global service firms (BGSFs) and performance implications thereof through strategic group analysis of hand-collected data from Indian information technology (IT) firms.

Strategic group analysis has been used to examine if there are any differences in the strategic decisions across firms and if there are any implications of these strategies on the performance of firms. The strategic group approach helps understand not only the antecedents but also the strategic trade-offs that different groups of BGSFs face after internationalization. The study uses Indian IT industry as the context for analysis of BGSFs, as studies have found that the Indian IT industry to have significant presence of born globals.

Four distinct strategic paths were found to be followed by BGSFs. In addition, the nature of services and ways of mobilization or deployment of resources explain the different internationalization paths and consequently performance. The performance differences primarily stem from the choice of degree of commitment and scope of internationalization.

This study provides distinct insights to practice by charting internationalization paths for an emerging born global.

This paper contributes to the theory on born globals by using strategic lens to explain the internationalization paths and their performance implications.

This paper attempts to examine the activity and involvement of board of directors in internationalization activities of firms in emerging markets, by evaluating the resource provisioning roles of interlocks provided by board of directors, and the frequency of board meetings. We demonstrate that the effectiveness of board involvement is contingent upon the levels of family ownership in firms since family ownership could impact the firm’s ability to utilize the presence of different types of board members.

The authors test our hypotheses on a sample of listed Indian companies, extracted from the Prowess database published by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a database of the financial performance of Indian companies. On a panel of 3,133 firm years of 605 unique Indian firms with foreign investments, over a time period of 2006–2017, the authors apply different estimation techniques.

The results demonstrate that both board meeting frequency and director interlocks are instrumental in supporting internationalization activities in emerging market firms. However, family ownership moderates the role of insider and independent interlocks on internationalization investments in different ways; the authors find that interlocks provided by independent directors support internationalization activities in family firms, whereas those provided by insider directors do not. Further, the study also finds that board meetings are less effective in internationalization of family firms.

The authors conclude that family firms aiming at international diversification require to develop more connected and networked independent directors to enable internationalization in firms. While independent director interlocks enhance the international investments, it is also useful to know that board meetings are ineffective in utilizing the resources in family firms. This points to the possibility that family firms should device mechanisms to integrate family meetings with board meetings so that they can utilize the within-family processes to aid in their internationalization decisions.

The study contributes to resource dependence theory by understanding its limiting role in family firms. Theoretically, it helps delineate the limiting resource provision role of the insider directors vis-à-vis independent directors. The authors argue that the resource provision role of insider director interlocks does not effectively help in internationalization in comparison to independent director interlocks in family-dominated firms. Consequently, the study shows the limiting role of resource provision and utilization by family-owned firms in comparison to non-family-owned firms.

Emerging Market Multinationals (EMNCs) are often seen as firms with singular identity. While they may share certain characteristics, EMNCs are seldom orchestrated and managed in the same manner. Through a cluster analysis of outward foreign direct investment data of EMNCs from India, we propose taxonomy of EMNCs based on their mode of operation, industry in which they operate, region where they invest and the amount invested. We use a dataset spread over 2007–2013, constituting investment data of 4,824 Indian firms into 7,238 foreign entities. Based on a two-step clustering approach, we propose three strategic archetypes of EMNCs: Global Service Providers, Integrated Manufacturers, and Established Internationalizers. The Global Service Providers mainly consists of firms operating in developed markets with an intention to serve their client needs through wholly owned subsidiaries. Integrated Manufacturers are firms that are primarily operating in other developing markets to sell their products through joint ventures and also present in developed markets through wholly owned subsidiaries – to acquire technology and other resources. The Established Internationalizers are large EMNCs with highest levels of investments, and relatively similar to the Western multinationals. We analyze the characteristics of these three groups of EMNCs based on their strategy and investment behavior, to derive insights into the heterogeneity across EMNCs. We discuss our findings and lay out future directions for research in the area.

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between corporate governance practices and internationalization through foreign direct investments in the context of family-owned business groups in India.

The comparative case study method is used to understand the relationship between corporate governance practices and internationalization using four family-owned business groups in India.

The ownership concentration negatively influences the internationalization, while transparency has a positive association. Professionalization of management helps in internationalization. Overall, good corporate governance practices have a positive influence on group internationalization.

This paper provides detailed discussions based on the case study research which would help the future research work on the relationship between corporate governance practices and internationalization.

The existing literature studies in this field in the context of emerging markets are inconclusive. Hence, this paper uses the case study method to understand the relationship better.