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Research on relationships between firms' degree of internationalization (DOI) and innovation performance has been mixed, and moderators of these relationships need to be explored. We focus on patents granted as an indicator of innovation performance and explore the moderating role of firms' home-country languages on the DOI–innovation performance relationship. We argue that in countries with languages that always require speakers to grammatically mark the future, firms will focus less on the future value of patents, which should moderate DOI–innovation performance relationships.

We use an unbalanced panel consisting of 567 firm-year observations of 64 different large automotive suppliers from the year 2007 through 2019. This database was analyzed using negative binomial models with a 3-years lag structure and firm controls.

Results show a U-shaped DOI–innovation performance relationship, but only for firms from countries that do not always require speakers to grammatically mark the future. Additionally, a firm's status as being from a country where dominate languages always require speakers to grammatically mark the future has a direct negative relationship with innovation performance.

Limitations are that the sample included a large number of firms from one country (i.e. Japan) and focused on a single industry. Additionally, we used a narrow operational definition of innovation performance (i.e. patents) and relied upon a single methodology. In terms of implications, we identify one moderator that helps explain mixed results of past DOI–innovation performance research, and we identify a direct relationship between language and innovation performance. Hence, future research in this area should control for the dominant language type of firms' home countries.

To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine how language moderates DOI–innovation performance relationships and also relates to innovation performance directly.

Top-management-teams (TMTs) and chief executive officers (CEOs) dealing with internationalization are naturally predisposed to deal with space, so they will consult “spatial knowledge.” The purpose of this paper is to offer a conceptual description of spatial knowledge used by TMTs/CEOs and to describe how the use of spatial knowledge can be triggered and the resulting biases that arise from it. The description of spatial knowledge is also discussed in relation to core international business (IB) theories/models.

This is a conceptual study.

TMTs/CEOs use spatial knowledge for internationalization decisions. This spatial knowledge is “declarative” because it involves knowledge of places and associated characteristics or attributes, “configurational” because it involves knowledge of various types of relative positions and proximities between places and “procedural” because it involves knowledge of how to structure transactions, operate or organize interdependencies between locations. Additionally, TMTs/CEOs individually have spatial knowledge that is uniquely distorted. Then, finally, when TMTs/CEOs consult spatial knowledge to identify international opportunities or solutions, their search process may entail distance and directional biases as a result of their spatial knowledge.

This is the first paper to introduce the notion of “spatial knowledge” to the research on TMT/CEO experiences and internationalization and IB research in general.