International entrepreneurship at the crossroads between innovation and internationalization

Abstract

In the last years, the global economy has undergone a dramatic change. Developed economies face the challenge of new players from emerging countries, slow growth problems, and even recession, combined with a weaker entrepreneurial activity (Amoros andBosma, 2014). This new economic order calls for a significant reshaping of competition, which leverages on the interplay of the discovery/enactment of new opportunities, the ability to create innovative value propositions and lead them to success, and the capacity to mobilize and manage resources at the global level. In other words, this new economic landscape requires a combination of entrepreneurship, innovation, and internationalization. Internationalization and innovation are two major options to achieve firm growth. Traditionally, these two routes to growth have been studied separately and only recently innovation and internationalization are increasingly seen as being strongly interrelated, with entrepreneurship representing the trait d’union between the two (Onetti et al. 2012; Etemad and Keen, 2012; Zucchella and Siano 2014). Entrepreneurial posture and the attitude to change and innovation play a central role in the internationalization process of both established firms and born global firms, especially in new, rapidly changing environments. However, the intersection of innovation, internationalization, and entrepreneurship is a field of study with a number of research gaps. In the first place, the causal relationship between innovation and internationalization is controversial. A large body of literature argues that international firms tend to exploit their superior innovative capabilities in several markets (e.g., Pla-Barber and Alegre, 2007; Kafouros et al., 2008; Cassiman and Golovko, 2011; Denicolai et al., 2014). According to other scholars, the relationship between innovation and internationalization is almost insignificant, and even negative (e.g. Hitt et al. 1997). Secondly, much of the international new venture literature is implicitly based on innovative and high-technology firms, the role of innovation in other sectors and in different typologies of international entrepreneurship (for example, immigrant entrepreneurs), types of business models which enhance the interplay between internationalization and innovation, etc. remain under-investigated. J Int Entrep (2014) 12:111–114 DOI 10.1007/s10843-014-0130-8