Emerging research issues in international entrepreneurship

Shaker A. Zahra, Peggy Cloninger, Ji Feng Yu and Youngjun Choi Research on international entrepreneurship (IE) has drawn worldwide attention. This chapter identifies six emerging areas in IE research, examines the progress in research on each to date, and outlines the theoretical and empirical foundations of this research. The chapter also identifies issues that require attention in future research and the methodological innovations necessary to address them. The discussion highlights bountiful opportunities for interesting and insightful IE research. The study of IE has grown rapidly over the past decade, reflecting the increasing globalization of business activities and the rising importance of entrepreneurship in gaining a competitive advantage in global markets. While the growth of this scholarship has been a welcome development, IE research has taken different directions and past findings have been noncumulative (Zahra and George, 2002). Therefore it is important to assess the progress made to date and to outline effective strategies to improve future research. One way to achieve this purpose is to focus on key emerging research issues, establish their theoretical relevance and propose an effective research strategy to pursue them. This chapter presents such an effort, hoping to give future research greater focus and to improve the quality of its findings. The six issues covered in this chapter are the effect of mode of entry on learning and subsequent organizational performance; the effect of industry characteristics on new ventures’ internationalization; internationalization of service industries; conducting comparative IE studies; the effect of the Internet on the internationalization of new firms; and building new theories in IE. These issues have received some interest in the literature but we believe that a qualitative shift in the thrust of future research is necessary. Besides grounding future IE research in good theory, researchers should go beyond traditional paradigms and develop new theories that define the boundaries of the IE field and give meaning to its findings.