International new ventures: Beyond definitional debates to advancing the cornerstone of international entrepreneurship

Abstract

ABSTRACT International entrepreneurship—the field dedicated to the discovery, enactment, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities across national borders to create future goods and services—is as inextricably linked to firm activity as entrepreneurship, strategy, or international business. However, for much of the past 30 years the field has been hampered by confusion and inconsistency over definitions and existential questions such as, “What is a born global?”; “what is an international new venture?”; and “how does one distinguish emerging firm types?” While many of these questions have been previously answered in isolation, confusion remains, as the field lacks a coherent unified perspective of firm activity. In this introduction to our thematic issue on international entrepreneurship, we address this need, present a unified model of international new ventures drawn from the latest definitions and distinctions, and call for future research that fully integrates form into the conversations of opportunity, technology, liability, and the unique network and value-chain alignments that exist across borders. We also discuss how we can better integrate and add value to nascent trends more broadly from neuroscience, deglobalization, intercultural arbitrage, and other areas.