Entrepreneurial Imagination and a Demand and Supply-side Perspective on the MNE and Cross-border Organization

Abstract

We focus on supply and the under-explored demand-side factors that help explicate cross-border expansion, the Multinational Enterprise (MNE) and organization. We explore how appropriability-informed and legacy-shaped entrepreneurial imagination motivates a process of creation and co-creation of the cross-border business context (such as markets, demand, and supporting infrastructures, including business ecosystems), and when feasible the wider institutional, regulatory and even cultural one, that conventional International Business (IB) literature takes as a datum. This is examined conceptually and by drawing on illustrative case examples. We claim that by focusing on agency, learning, intentionality and demand-side factors, our approach complements, and also challenges extant sometimes static, supply-side, agent-agnostic theories of the MNE and helps appreciate better phenomena such as market, demand and value creation, and co-creation, MNEs without firm specific advantages and born-global firms.