International Business Innovations and (a New) Learning

Abstract

We claim that International Business (IB) scholars have made significant contributions of general interest and applicability to business and strategy scholarship, that could be attributed to their focus on the cross-border operations of firms; that theories and envelopes of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the Multinational Enterprise (MNE), such as Hymer’s and the Ownership, Location, Internalisation (OLI) perspective need to be integrated and extended to embrace the role of knowledge and learning accumulation so as to better delineate the I(nternational) part of IB; that a number of important IB innovations require improved understanding and theory development; and that the role of knowledge and learning are critical in helping explain these. Such learning needs to be extended to the issues of organisation, market, ecosystem and institution creation and co-creation, in order to produce a better understanding of the uniqueness of cross-border, the MNE, FDI and IB.