International Business Review – Volume 34, Issue 4, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ibusrev.2025.102421
Born globals, international new ventures, and international entrepreneurship: Reflections and a research agenda.
Gary Knight, Zaheer Khan, Niina Nummela
In this editorial for the Special Issue of International Business Review, we examine research on born global firms (BGs), international new ventures (INVs), and international entrepreneurship (IE). This issue marks the 30th and 20th anniversaries, respectively, of the seminal works by Oviatt and McDougall (1994) and Knight and Cavusgil (2004). BGs and INVs represent enterprising firms that begin internationalizing at or near their founding. IE emphasizes proactive, innovative, and risk-seeking behaviours that identify and exploit international opportunities to achieve superior international performance. After examining research on BGs, INVs and IE since 1994, we explore how recent phenomena have altered the international business (IB) environment and the impact that these shifts have had on early internationalizing firms. We then introduce and summarize the articles in this special issue. We conclude by proposing potential themes and theoretical perspectives for future research in this distinctive area of IB.
Journal of International Entrepreneurship – DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10843-025-00382-z
Innovation within international entrepreneurship: A review and research agenda.
Juan Velez-Ocampo, Andrés A. Garcia, José Arias-Pérez
For over three decades, international entrepreneurship (IE) literature has evolved using a combination of international business and entrepreneurship theories and approaches to analyze international new ventures (INVs) or born global firms (BGs). There are three dimensions commonly attributed to firms that engage in IE: innovation, risk-seeking action, and proactive behavior. This systematic literature review analyzes the role of innovation within the IE literature. To do so, we applied the theory, context, characteristics, and methodology model (TCCM) to a corpus of 190 articles published between 2000 and 2022. Based on this analysis, we present an integrative framework and research opportunities in each of the eight identified streams: innovation ecosystems and networks in IE, knowledge as an innovation driver in IE, organizational culture and innovation in IE, the role of networks on innovation processes in IE, the relationship between innovation and performance in IE, the influence of innovation on internationalization speed of INV or BGs, entrepreneur traits and their influence on innovation in IE, the role of business models on innovation within IE, and the linkages between marketing and innovation on IE.
Small Business Economics – DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-025-01118-y
Is entrepreneurship in secular decline?
Peter J. Buckley
This paper argues that both on the supply and the demand side, entrepreneurship is in secular decline. On the supply side, the balance of rewards to the exercise of the entrepreneurship function is diminishing as potential entrepreneurs value other pursuits and leisure rather than entrepreneurial activities. On the demand side, civil society has begun to shun entrepreneurial activities as exploitative, damaging to the individual, fostering inequality, and at odds with the environmental, societal and governance (ESG) agenda. Entrepreneurship and the twenty-first century zeitgeist are incompatible.