This article investigates the internationalization process of incubating, parenting, and eventually spinning-off overseas entrepreneurial ventures originating from emerging markets. In a comparative case study of Chinese high-tech firms, we leveraged multiple sources of data to reveal (1) how the exploitation of parent firms’ technological and platform resources enables them to initiate, support, and eventually profit from the international growth of foreign ventures that autonomously engage in the exploration of product and market innovations, and (2) how ambidextrous synergy was created through the continuous exchange, combination, and reconfiguration of knowledge and resources between parent firms and foreign ventures. These findings extend our understanding of how Chinese high-tech firms manage the learning process in overseas venturing. We draw implications of these findings for research and practice.

In the context of China's rising global role, the question of where its academia is moving to becomes a matter of concern. Embedded in the literature on academic (de)colonization and intellectual pluralism, research was conducted by Chinese educational scholars on the status quo of educational studies on and in mainland China within the world system of knowledge production. We report its major findings in order to respond to continuing struggles within the contemporary Chinese academic society and between global “centres” and “peripheries.” Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with both overseas ethnic Chinese and non-Chinese education researchers, as well as bibliographic and content analyses among relevant academic publications, its findings indicate the growing but still limited global impact of educational studies on/in China especially theoretically and epistemologically, tensions between “centres” and “peripheries” within the world knowledge system, as well as tensions between internationalization and local knowledge. Suggestions for future directions have been concluded based on empirical data.

In the 1990s, three Scandinavian news media companies, Bonnier, Kinnevik, and Schibsted, internationalized their newspapers. Despite doing this during the same period, competing in the same industry and institutional environment, being exposed to the same opportunities by the opening of the Eastern European markets, and all belonging to a smaller language area, they differed in their internationalization models as well as in their outcomes. Despite initial successes, Bonnier and Kinnevik eventually discontinued their newspapers in the new markets, in many cases following significant losses, while Schibsted fared better. The main explanation for using different internationalization models was differences in business models, basically striving to do business internationally in a similar way as domestically. That is, they did not choose a specific internationalization model but sought to simply expand their business models internationally. Consequently, this article finds that when researching internationalization, more focus should be placed on business models.

This article examines China’s path to joining the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), a private international organization founded in Paris in 1920, of which China was a member from 1931–1949 and from 1994 onwards. The article charts the actors and debates behind two meaningful encounters. The first took place while the Nanjing government was raising funds for economic reconstruction, and the ICC aimed to mediate China’s fundraising efforts through private multilateral channels. The second was in the 1980s, when the People’s Republic was seeking to enter the world trade system. ICC members acted as educators and facilitators of world trade practicalities for the People’s Republic, which eventually rejoined the ICC in 1994. The article draws on Chinese, European, and American source material collected from governments, chambers of commerce, and private businessmen to make a twofold contribution. First, it adds nuance to the narrative of China’s economic internationalization by identifying an important non-governmental diplomatic channel. Second, it questions the ICC’s self-proclaimed identity as a non-political economic organization by showing how the political was indissociable from the economic when it came to China’s membership.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing trend in Chinese arbitration reform that emulates international norms and practices. This article examines some of these key reform measures and major challenges to their implementation. It explores in both legal and practical terms why most of these reform techniques may remain largely ineffective, showing that engaging in international norms and standards in China can be highly challenging due to their potential illegality, the general lack of institutional capacity to sustain them, and the conflicts of local ideas about the purposes of arbitration. It is thus doubtful whether commitment to satisfying the formal requirements prescribed by the legal reforms would often prevail. When it does, it is questionable whether this form of commitment would become prevalent and how it could proceed in a sustainable and coherent manner from a practical perspective.

Ahsan, Sinha, and Srinivasan (2020) studied the motives of knowledge-intensive Indian firms’ international expansion based on resource-based considerations and the locational advantages offered by host countries. They identified firm characteristics associated with strategic asset-seeking, opportunity-seeking, and market-seeking motives. In this replication study, we examine Ahsan et al.'s (2020) model in the Chinese context. Based on our improved empirical model, our findings reveal some similarities but more importantly some key differences in the antecedents of internationalization motives between Indian and Chinese firms. Drawing on insights from prior studies, we propose that these differences can be attributed to differences in absorptive capacity, international expansion scales and patterns, ownership type, and the home institutional contexts in which Indian and Chinese firms operate. Overall, this replication study demonstrates the importance of contextualizing international business research.

This paper comments on Yulun Ma and Yue Hu's (2021) recent article ‘Business Model Innovation and Experimentation in Transforming Economies: ByteDance and TikTok’. It argues that TikTok's international success is not due to so-called business model innovation; instead, it is because ByteDance has overcome three major hurdles facing emerging market firms pursuing internationalization. It also posits that the case of TikTok offers inspiration for theorizing paradox, namely, individuals and organizations can solve paradoxical tensions by increasing capacity through the use of advanced technologies.

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.

In an attempt to respond to recent calls for better understanding the coexistence of multiple business models, we develop the concept of ‘multidexterity’ – the ability to develop, nurture, and execute several distinctive BM strategies simultaneously across different levels and functions of the MNC and its host markets. To illustrate this approach, we describe a European healthcare firm entering the rapidly transforming economy of China and facing regulatory constraints and ambiguities in the application of industry standards. This situation is a generic challenge for MNCs entering rapidly transforming economies, which they help in turn to substantially alter and develop. We argue multidextrous business models are effective entry strategies for MNCs. They also help resolve two conceptual limitations in the BMI literature: (1) the problem of environmental contingencies and (2) the interrelatedness of factors at the macro, meso, and micro levels. We address these problems from a practice approach. We provide some implications for the concept of multidexterity and business models and address managerial challenges and prospects in developing multidextrous organizations.

The relationship between internationalization and performance has attracted researchers’ attention for more than 40 years, producing contradictory results. Research on emerging-market (EM) multinationals’ performance has not added much clarity to the issue. Although contingency theory is widely applied in management research to explain superior organizational performance as a direct result of a ‘fit’ between structure, strategy, and environment, there has been little effort in extending the notion of strategy-structure-environment fit to include internationalization. We address this limitation by offering a comprehensive analysis of Russian internationalized firms’ performance, which reflects the complexity of strategic and structural changes that Russian firms make during internationalization. We use survey data on 213 predominantly private and mature firms to examine whether the alignment of a multitude of strategic and structural choices in a specific context matters for subsequent performance. We apply a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) and find several distinct types of ‘fit’ that positively affect Russian internationalized firms’ performance.