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Recent empirical findings on the relationship between internationalization and firm performance (I–P) suggest a significant role of firm's context. Extending this line of argument, the authors study the effect of internationalization on firm's performance for emerging market firms from knowledge-intensive industries, taking into account the firm's motive of internationalization and host country’s location-based advantages.

The authors link host country-specific advantages (CSAs) with firm-specific advantages (FSAs) to identify three distinct settings of internationalization for emerging economy firms – (1) asset-exploitative internationalization in developing or least developed countries, (2) asset-exploitative internationalization in developed countries and (3) strategic asset-seeking internationalization. The authors test this study’s hypotheses on a sample of 415 Indian firms from knowledge-intensive industries.

The authors find that firm's performance upon internationalization is non-linear in each of the three different settings. The nature of the non-linear relationship depends upon location-based advantages of the host country and the motive of internationalization.

The motive of internationalization and the location-based advantages sought during internationalization are unique for emerging economy firms. Hence, the study extends understanding of the I–P linkage in an emerging economy context.

First, this paper aims to argue that small- and medium-sized manufacturers’ (SMMs’) production-exploitation can generally and primary influence their choices of export marketing control modes (EMCMs). Building on this central argument, two other supportive production-related resources: “production-exploration” and “relationships with home suppliers” are argued that could moderate this proposed effect. Three EMCMs including independent, hybrid and integrated modes, are discussed. Second, this study also proposes that SMMs with an internal fit between their three-key production-related resources and their choices of EMCMs will outperform their counterparts that do not have such internal fit.

This study designed a multiple-source survey to collect data from 158 Taiwanese SMMs that are highly dependent on export sales.

The results support the argument and the study connects the resource-based view (RBV) to the B2B marketing literature to better understand the EMCMs of SMMs.

Drawing on the RBV, this study examines how the three-key production-related resources can influence SMMs’ choices of EMCMs of branding and channels, respectively.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance impact of foreign ventures' exploration and exploitation strategies in emerging markets. Exploration and exploitation represent key strategic choices and have been extensively studied in the context of domestic markets. Yet the implication of such innovation strategies for foreign ventures operating in emerging markets has been under-researched. We aim to investigate whether foreign ventures can realize the value of exploration and exploitation strategies in emerging markets and also the moderating role of marketing capability and operation flexibility to enable the implementation process.

This study adopts the hierarchical moderated regression approach using a sample of foreign ventures operating in high-tech manufacturing industries in China.

The authors find that both exploration and exploitation have positive effects on firms' financial performance. Marketing capability strengthens the performance impact of exploration, but exhibits no such impact of exploitation. Moreover, operation flexibility positively moderates the effects of both exploration and exploitation on performance.

This study provides important insights into whether foreign ventures can boost performance through exploration and exploitation strategies in emerging markets as well as the implementation-level factors that can facilitate such positive effects.

The study is novel in revealing the moderating role of marketing capability and operation flexibility in facilitating the performance outcome of exploration and exploitation strategies.

This paper aims to investigate the internationalization motives behind location choice among emerging country business groups (EBGs) and the way in which institutional factors affect Türkiye’s foreign direct investment (FDI).

This study develops a multi-perspective framework that integrates the ownership, location and internalization (OLI) paradigm (Dunning and Lundan, 2008) and the linkage, leverage and learning (LLL) model (Mathews, 2006) with neo-institutional theory to explain the internationalization of EBGs. It adopts a multiple-case study research method relying on 14 semi-structured interviews with top executives to explore the internationalization strategy of a set of Turkish BGs.

This study supports the combination of the OLI paradigm, the LLL model and neo-institutional theory to explain EBGs’ internationalizing behaviors. Turkish BGs have adopted both asset exploitation and asset augmentation internationalization strategies. The institutional legitimacy mechanism moderates the internationalization motives of Turkish BGs, and their host country location choice and normative pressures are more salient than their regulative and cognitive pressures.

This study is based on a sample of EBGs from Türkiye, and this restriction limits the generalizability/applicability of the findings to BGs globally.

Few studies have considered EBGs and their internationalization strategies in the international business field. This paper puts forward an integrated framework for analyzing internationalization and legitimacy in the institutional context of EBGs. This study highlights that BGs bridge institutional voids. Focusing on Turkish BGs helps to answer Granovetter’s Coasian question and contributes to the understanding of emerging countries’ economic development.

Unlike the traditional growth model of emerging markets after economic liberalization, India’s inward foreign direct investment (FDI) surged paralleling its strong economic growth in the 2000s, despite the failure to establish a strong secondary sector. This creates an opportunity to deepen the conceptual and contextual understanding of the pivotal mechanisms that impel foreign multinational enterprises to invest into India and provides a natural setting to better understand the nature of its institutional, political and economic environment.

The authors develop a theory contextualized to Indian inward FDI patterns for the 2000–2017 period. The theoretical framework expands upon received investment motives, with explicit consideration given to the idiosyncrasies of developments in India’s recent macro and socioeconomic environment. The authors test the hypotheses using panel data from 134 countries that invested in India, using a Hausman–Taylor estimation.

The authors find that India’s transition toward a knowledge economy attracts asset augmenting rather than asset exploiting FDI. Investors appear to target long-term investments by gaining access to India’s digital capabilities, R&D, and growing talent base with a high degree of specialization within analytics, biotechnology, engineering, or pharmaceuticals. Foreign investors do not seem to be notably deterred by infrastructural challenges nor by legal and regulatory restrictions.

By providing a new perspective on India’s atheoretical economic development and FDI environment, this study offers a distinct point of comparison with regard to established hypotheses within the extant literature on FDI into emerging markets. Rethinking contemporary investment motive theory by introducing an adapted conceptual framework provides further opportunity to inform the understanding of firm strategies in similar environments.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how path dependence in the evolution of major theories of foreign direct investment (FDI) locked in a theoretical perspective of the multinational enterprise that focused on asset-exploitation. This perspective is challenged by recent contradicting observations of multinationals from China and other emerging economies. A decisive re-orientation of FDI theory is proposed as a way forward to resolve this tension.

Placing FDI theories into the context of FDI patterns prevailing at the time they were developed, Thomas Kuhn’s framework on the evolution of scientific knowledge is employed to track how the mainstream FDI theory emerged, went through a period of normal science and then approached a crisis of science in this field.

The evolution of FDI theory is strongly path-dependent, which made it difficult for theory to effectively incorporate new conceptual discoveries and empirical findings about the nature of FDI activity.

FDI theory would benefit from a full re-orientation to a demand-oriented perspective which places the pursuit of advantages, assets, resources, etc., at the core of the theory. Such a change is implicit in many recent theoretical advances and would assure theory is generalizable to all types of FDI.

The chapter provides an economic explanation and perspectivation of strategic asset seeking of multinational enterprises from emerging economies (EMNEs) as a prominent feature of today’s global economy.

The authors apply and extend the “springboard perspective.” This perspective submits that EMNEs acquire strategic assets in developed markets primarily for use in their home markets.

The authors succumb that the springboard perspective is alluring theoretically as well as empirically as it suggests that when EMNEs acquire strategic assets, they experience liabilities of foreignness (LOF) that are low relative to those of MNEs from developed markets. The authors concede to this LOF asymmetry but also point out that liabilities of outsidership (LOO) can offset or weaken the home-market advantage of some EMNEs when competing with MNEs.

LOO appears as the more relevant concept to use when explaining strategic asset seeking of EMNEs. A set of propositions are formulated to guide empirical testing.

The insights gained from using the springboard perspective and the LOO concept are non-trivial: They basically predict future dominance of ‘insider’ EMNEs at the expense of MNEs from developed markets.

The purpose of this paper is to shed more light on the concept of “strategic asset-seeking FDI”, which is frequently used in discussion of emerging economy multinational enterprises (MNEs), but it is challenged by some scholars. The author argues that he needs this category because an important type of foreign direct investment (FDI) is not captured by the other motives identified by John Dunning, namely, market-, efficiency- and natural-resource-seeking FDI.

The author illustrates the phenomenon of strategic asset-seeking FDI with case examples that form the starting point for his theoretical arguments.

Some FDI is undertaken explicitly with the aim to use assets acquired abroad to enhance the operations of the investor in other markets, including, notably, the investors’ home market. This contribution to capability-building processes of the MNE, indeed, constitutes an important and distinct type of investment motive.

The author concluded that Dunning’s typology remains a powerful tool to analyze contemporary business strategies, but it suggests refining the definition of the categories.

Emerging-market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) can choose focused or ambidextrous strategies to catch up with global market leaders through overseas foreign direct investment (OFDI). The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched by the Chinese government in 2013, had a profound impact on Chinese multinational enterprises’ international behavior. This paper analyses how EMNEs select focused or ambidextrous catch-up strategies before and after the BRI, integrating ambidexterity and catch-up theories to provide a more nuanced understanding of the evolution of EMNE strategy.

A case study is well suited for deriving rich descriptions of empirical phenomena for which little theory exists. Because the existing literature has not yet fully explored and conceptually modeled the influence of windows of opportunity on international catch-up strategies, we use qualitative research to explore the mechanisms of strategy evolution in EMNEs.

The results show that the choice of catch-up strategy is influenced by the nature of windows of opportunity and the firm's accumulated technological capability. Specifically, the opening of institutional windows as a result of the BRI could give significant momentum to the international catch-up process by providing incentives and opportunities for EMNEs to enter more markets and new technology fields. The EMNEs studied underwent a transition from a focused strategy in the catch-up stage to an ambidextrous strategy in the beyond catch-up stage.

These conclusions can not only deepen our understanding of the dynamics of catch-up strategies in the global context but also enrich the research on the ambidexterity of EMNEs, especially in the context of the BRI.

Extant research has integrated ambidexterity perspective into international business studies and calls for emerging market multinational enterprises (EM MNEs) to implement exploration and exploitation activities simultaneously in foreign markets. However, less attention has been paid to empirically test whether and how international ambidexterity can benefit the innovation performance of EM MNEs. Based on the data of international manufacturing firms in China, this paper explores the relationship between international ambidexterity and innovation performance and investigates four contingency factors of top management team (TMT): two external resource accumulation elements (i.e. TMT business ties and TMT political ties) and two internal resource integration elements (i.e. TMT contingency rewards and TMT social integration).

The author conducts multiple hierarchical linear regression analysis to test the hypothesis by collecting survey data from 227 MNEs from several Economic Development Zones located in Zhejiang province in China.

The results show that international ambidexterity is positively related to innovation performance, and the international ambidexterity–innovation performance relationship is amplified when TMTs build strong ties with external business partners and political departments, when EM MNEs link top managers' income to team collective performance and create a highly social integrated TMT.

The results contributes to answer the question that how well EM MNEs will succeed and enrich the context specificity of international ambidexterity. The findings also help us better understand the inconsistent empirical findings in organizational ambidexterity by uncovering the contingency role of several TMT attributes.