Although transforming economies offer many examples of business model innovation, they have been largely overlooked in academic research, with most studies focusing on what happens in developed countries. However, in their push to become innovation economies, transforming economies have become experimentation arenas for new ways of doing business. This special issue addresses the gap in business model innovation research in several ways. First, we develop a co-evolutionary framework in which we consider what type of business model innovation occurs in transforming economies (adoption, adaptation, or creation) and who the central players are (indigenous firms or MNEs). We show how, through business model innovation, indigenous firms have begun to challenge global industry leaders – despite not having the same resource advantages, proprietary technology, or market power – and we highlight the consequences of this for the domestic and global environment. Second, we discuss how the articles in this special issue advance research by contributing to a co-evolutionary perspective on business model innovation for a global and digital world. Third, to guide future research on business model innovation in the fascinating context of transforming economies we outline various directions that could build on our framework and the articles presented here.

On September 27, 2018, Professor James G. March, a giant in our field, passed away at the age of 90 (1928–2018), just one month after his wife and high school sweetheart, Jayne, passed away. March's impact on the field of organization studies and beyond is profound and long-lasting. The advancement of the field is truly indebted to March's brilliance and dedication to the search of truth as a great scholar. March wrote the inaugural article for Management and Organization Review (MOR) (2005), ‘Parochialism in the Evolution of a Research Community: The Case of Organization Studies’. This article not only provided a critical foundation underlying the editorial structure and philosophy of MOR but also argued eloquently for the salience of indigenous Chinese management studies as a necessary condition for building both contextualized and universal knowledge.

Organizational hybridity refers to the combination of multiple institutional logics and identities that, within an organizational setting, do not conventionally complement one another. In such conditions, organizations must develop strategies to combine logics and sustain their hybrid forms. Success, however, is not inevitable. In this article, we take a legitimacy-as-process perspective to focus on a failed Microfinance Organization (MFO) in the African context of Zambia. MFOs represent a fascinating context because of their hybrid nature and need to balance several competing institutional demands. We utilise field interviews to analyse the process through which MFOs fail, analysing actor legitimation responses to emerging hybridity demands. We identify three phases associated with these changes: 1) dependent coupling, (2) misaligning legitimation, and (3) circumnavigating over conformity. Our findings emphasise that legitimation efforts in a failed hybrid are not simply the reverse of those that succeed. We observe adaptive processes consistent with successful hybrids but that ultimately sow the seeds of eventual failure. This demonstrates the need to re-think the role of legitimation strategies in hybrids alongside their potential deleterious consequences.

Within the last two decades, the international expansion of Latin American companies has undergone remarkable growth. This phenomenon has attracted scholarly attention, however, most of the available research is focused on companies that have already engaged in foreign direct investment (FDI), meanwhile, Latin American firms in pre-FDI stages remain mostly understudied. This article uses an explanatory case study design to analyze the corporate reputation and decision-making process related to international expansion of a set of ten Latin American companies. Both archival and primary data were used in the individual and cross-case analyses stages for 22 months. Our study identifies and establishes analytical generalizations when examining and contrasting the findings with the previously revised theoretical frameworks. More specifically, we identified that these companies exhibit similarities with the behavior of Jaguars, the Latin American wild feline; especially because of (i) their preference to remain in their regional market to exploit current capabilities and advantages, and eventually enter developed markets to upgrade capabilities and surpass strong competitors at home; (ii) their strategies to disguise their country of origin and lack of experience when operating internationally; and (iii) their solitary behavior and reluctance to engage in partnerships and/or strategic alliances unless they have a specific interest in building legitimacy and enhancing reputation.

We study the impact of formal and informal institutions perceived and experienced by firms on their innovation using the 2012 World Bank Enterprise Survey data in China. We propose a framework to identify different innovator types of firms. Our analysis shows that (1) perceived constraints from the governmental system make firms more likely to be innovators than non-innovators; (2) perceived constraints from the legal system make firms more likely to be imitators than innovators; (3) lack of formal finance makes firms more likely to be non-innovators than innovators; (4) prevalence of bribery makes firms more likely to be non-innovators than innovators but less likely to be innovation pretenders than innovators. Our study enriches institutional theory and innovation research by establishing a framework that encompasses multiple dimensions of formal and informal institutions perceived and experienced by firms and the impacts of such perception and experience on firms’ propensity to become certain type of innovator.

Chinese bureaucracy, with its long history and distinctive characteristics, has provided the organizational basis of governance and played a pivotal role in the economic takeoff in recent decades. Chinese bureaucracy also shows intriguing dualism between entrepreneurial activism and bureaucratic inertia, between formal rules and informal institutions, and between high responsiveness and noticeable loose coupling. In this study, I explore these distinctive features of Chinese bureaucracy through three lenses: Weber's comparative-historical approach helps locate Chinese bureaucracy in a distinct mode of domination; the Confucian lens identifies the prevalence of informal institutions that underlie bureaucratic behaviors; and the Marchian lens sheds light on the organized anarchy and set of mechanisms that shape the key characteristics of Chinese bureaucracy.

This study adopts a configurational perspective to examine how business model designs and contextual factors in transforming economies combine to create value. We investigate configurations of efficiency-centered and novelty-centered business model designs, corporate ownership, development stage, and external regulatory volatility associated with high growth in a transforming economy. Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of Chinese firms, we find five solutions associated with superior growth, suggesting that the effective configurations of business model designs vary in different contexts. Our study offers a holistic understanding of the relationship between business model designs and firm growth, and yields useful insights for business model designs for practitioners.

A cartel is an association of independent businesses for the purpose of regulating trade in an industry. There are three important reasons for studying international cartels: they will become important in the future; they are of immense historical significance; and they are poorly understood. This paper reviews the economic, political, and historical literatures on international cartels and considers the lessons for international business theory and policy. If IB researchers are to retain their reputation for policy-relevance, they must engage with the issue of institutional responses to globalization, and this must include the analysis of cartels.

This study provides new insights into the role of subsidiary managers in the practice of global business models of multinational enterprises in transforming economies. Drawing on the global business model literature and through semi-structured interviews with a leading Norwegian maritime multinational enterprise in China, we have developed and critically explored a theoretical framework for uncovering how subsidiary managers understand and manage the tensions between the headquarters based in a western country and the subsidiaries based in a transforming economy. More specifically, when implementing the global business model in the transforming economy, subsidiary managers need to undertake effective management of structural, behavioural, and cultural tensions along with the global integration-local responsiveness dilemma. Subsidiary managers can contribute to solving structural tensions between the headquarters and subsidiary by undertaking effective market sensing and knowledge transfer activities to integrate the transforming economies into the MNE's global production networks. Meanwhile, they need to make effective relationship management to solve behavioural and cultural tensions.

This article aims to understand how Eastern and Western philosophies shape the perspectives of scholars and practitioners in framing co-opetition (i.e., the coexistence of competition and cooperation) in distinctive manners and, in turn, how such distinctions shape the behavioral patterns of co-opetition. We disentangle the constructs of competition and cooperation and their coexistence as proposed by three Chinese schools of thought (i.e., Taoism, Confucianism, and Legalism) and three Western philosophers (i.e., Immanuel Kant, Georg W. F. Hegel, and Adam Smith). Based on this groundwork, we unveil four comparative philosophical logics used to address the essence of co-opetition (i.e., either/or, both/and, both/or, and either/and). In addition, we apply such East-meeting-West linkages to a typology of co-opetition strategies.