New IE Articles — May 2021

Journal of World Business—DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2021.101227

Exporting to escape and learn: Vietnamese manufacturers in global value chains

Rui Torres de Oliveira, Tam Nguyen, Peter Liesch, Martie-Louise Verreynne, Marta Indulska

It is assumed in the international entrepreneurship and international business literatures that firms entering overseas markets possess attributes that are unique and valuable, providing them with an advantage that offsets their liability of foreignness. There is a further assumption that the market knowledge acquired through exporting is independent of export destination. We challenge these two assumptions in a longitudinal study of Vietnamese new venture firms. We report that innovation in these firms is ex-post exporting and not ex-ante as expected. The Vietnamese firms in our study that engage in exporting as international suppliers into global value chains show evidence of process innovation after exporting, but not of product innovation. We also report that exporting to advanced economies enhances process innovation, but that firms exporting to emerging economies neither innovate their processes nor products.

Journal of World Business—DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2021.101207

Emerging market internationalizing firms: Learning through internationalization to achieve entrepreneurial orientation

Anish Purkayastha, Vikas Kumar, Vishal K. Gupta

Internationalizing firms export, raise foreign equity, and acquire foreign assets. Based on motivations and processes of emerging market internationalizing firms (EMIFs) and drawing on the organizational learning theory, we propose that EMIFs increase their entrepreneurial orientation through internationalization. We argue that a configuration of learning from exports, cross-listing, and international M&A improves entrepreneurial orientation in EMIFs. Longitudinal (nine-year period) data drawn from 809 Indian firms supports our hypotheses.

Entrepreneurship & Regional Development —DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2021.1872934

Analyzing the macro-level determinants of user entrepreneurship. The moderating role of the national culture

David Kalisz, Francesco Schiavone, Giorgia Rivieccio, Céline Viala,  Junsong Chen 

Scholars have extensively analysed country-based determinants of entrepreneurship over the last few decades. One of these is national culture. To date such a body of knowledge was underestimated in one of the rising streams of literature observed over the last decade: user entrepreneurship. To fill this research gap, the research questions of the present paper are: What is the impact of country-level factors on user entrepreneurship? What is the role of culture in such a relationship? The study analyzes new business units’ activities created by user innovators in the healthcare industry, exploring the effects of the four dimensions of the entrepreneurship model by Thai and Turkina. The adopted methodology uses statistical methods based on principal component analysis (PCA), cluster analysis, and polynomial regression models. Findings indicate a clustering behaviour among countries with similar user entrepreneurial activities. Such behaviour highlights the macro-level determinants of health user entrepreneurship, defining a curvilinear relationship among these. In particular, an inverted U-shaped curve emerges when user entrepreneurship is combined with a country’s health culture. We detect a moderation effect of national culture on such a nonlinear relationship at the cross-country level.

Entrepreneurship & Regional Development—DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2021.1872936

Innovation and the knowledge-base for entrepreneurship: investigating SME innovation across European regions using fsQCA

Malcolm Beynon, Paul Jones & David Pickernell

Using a 2019 data set, 236 regions across 26 European countries are investigated, focusing on four, interlinked, conditions of potential relevance to SME innovation, specifically measures focused on levels of human capital, internal firm innovation, innovation collaborations and broader knowledge collaborations between public and private sectors. The methodology applied uses a configurational approach to elucidate relationships, specifically fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to evaluate how these conditions affect sales of new-to-market and new-to-firm innovations as a percentage of total turnover for SMEs in each region against the EU 2019 average (NMFS). In addition to existence of the classic ‘core’ region ‘innovation ecosystem’ recipe, having presence of three of the four conditions (in-house innovation being non-relevant), analysis reveals innovation policy may require specific tailoring in certain types of regions. This suggests greater collaboration is required to overcome more extensive absence of other parts of the Regional Innovation System, in-house innovation required to overcome lack of education alone. The main contributions of the research are to generate a more comprehensive evaluation of the complexity of innovation at the regional level, graphical ‘map’ based elucidation of findings also contributing to establishing a baseline for future analysis for European regions’ SME-innovation performance.

Management International Review—DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-021-00440-3

Exploring the Role of Diversity Management During Early Internationalizing Firms’ Internationalization Process

Angélique Breuillot

Despite their rapid internationalization, early internationalizing firms (EIFs) struggle to sustain their growth over time. Among the factors influencing their internationalization process, the diversity of human resources, and particularly its management, has yet to be studied. Building on different perspectives of diversity management, through the lens of the resource-based view, this study explores the role of diversity management during EIFs’ internationalization process. The results of a multiple-case, qualitative study of French EIFs show that prevailing perspectives on diversity management within EIFs change with the nature of diversity as a resource (strategic, ordinary, or negative), with different influences on the firms’ progress along the phases of the internationalization process. The findings highlight the importance of adopting a learning perspective on managing diversity, including specific management practices, during the transition between the entry and post-entry phases of EIFs’ internationalization process. This study thus suggests several propositions and theoretical contributions, along with managerial recommendations.