International new ventures: Beyond definitional debates to advancing the cornerstone of international entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

International entrepreneurship—the field dedicated to the discovery, enactment, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities across national borders to create future goods and services—is as inextricably linked to firm activity as entrepreneurship, strategy, or international business. However, for much of the past 30 years the field has been hampered by confusion and inconsistency over definitions and existential questions such as, “What is a born global?”; “what is an international new venture?”; and “how does one distinguish emerging firm types?” While many of these questions have been previously answered in isolation, confusion remains, as the field lacks a coherent unified perspective of firm activity. In this introduction to our thematic issue on international entrepreneurship, we address this need, present a unified model of international new ventures drawn from the latest definitions and distinctions, and call for future research that fully integrates form into the conversations of opportunity, technology, liability, and the unique network and value-chain alignments that exist across borders. We also discuss how we can better integrate and add value to nascent trends more broadly from neuroscience, deglobalization, intercultural arbitrage, and other areas.

KEYWORDS:

• International entrepreneurship
• IE
• international new ventures
• INVs
• born globals
• internationalization
• entrepreneurial cognition
• intercultural dynamics

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Nicole Coviello and Patricia McDougall-Covin for their friendly reviews and support throughout the development of this article. We would particularly like to thank Shaker Zahra for both his review and also providing us access to two forthcoming papers related to this topic, allowing us align this editorial with and support that emergent work. We acknowledge that the insights and approval of leading scholars in IE have helped us tremendously in maximizing the usefulness of this issue for future scholars in this domain moving forward.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The term “international entrepreneurship has been attributed (by Zahra & George, 2017) first to Morrow (1988), with further motivation in JIBS with Wright and Ricks (1994) earmarking international entrepreneurship as an emerging research topic.

² Oviatt and McDougall’s (1994: 49) – “we define an international new venture as a business organization that from inception, seeks to derive significant competitive advantage from the use of resources and the sale of outputs in multiple countries.”.

³ There are two main foci of international entrepreneurship research (Jones et al., 2011), internationalization and comparative international entrepreneurship (e.g., Terjesen et al., 2016). Internationalization, where INVs are the focus, is by far the largest track.

⁴ Of the remaining two, one (Del Sarto et al., 2021), looked at new ventures in general and linked exporting with survival, consistent with Cavusgil and Knight (2015); the other a conceptual paper vaguely conceptualized born globals as any early internationalizing firm (Nguyen & Mort, 2021).

⁵ Attributed to film producer Samuel Goldwyn.