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This study aims to explore the advantage of foreignness in a digital world.

Usage data for 251 days of 32 travel mobile applications installed on a major mobile phone brand in China are examined. Results support the author’s arguments.

Foreign mobile apps enjoy higher daily usage time than local apps. Next, the author consider how foreign apps can maximize their advantage, that is, increase daily usage time. The author argue that a multinational enterprise (MNE) can digitally enter a country that has numerous immigrants from its home country because of the high number of potential long tail users. A high level of diversity of international experience of MNEs increases the ability to understand and satisfy the specific needs of long tail users, thereby increasing daily usage time of foreign mobile apps. To maximize the advantage of foreignness in a digital world, MNEs can also carefully select business models that do not heavily rely on network effect, given the difficulty of generating network effect by long tail users.

Previous studies focus on the liability of foreignness or outsidership that MNEs encounter in the digital world, whereas this study argues that foreignness brings certain benefits, such as the capability to satisfy the specific needs of long tail users.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on how multinational company (MNC) headquarters (HQs) can manage the existing coopetition paradox to ensure innovation within the MNC. In contrast to the rather scarce previous research, the authors argue that HQ needs to solve the coopetition paradox under the sway of a parenting paradox. Hence, HQ faces a dual paradox.

Drawing on the literature on HQ’s role during MNCs’ innovation processes, this conceptual paper revisits the previously suggested HQ measures to enable coopetition among subsidiaries. By applying a sheer ignorance perspective, the authors contribute with a more nuanced understanding of the HQ’s role in innovation activities.

The article identifies four challenges as the HQ faces a parenting paradox that hinders its ability to solve the coopetition paradox: context specificity of subsidiaries’ innovation work, normative expectations of subsidiary managers, potential opportunistic behavior of HQ manager and HQ underestimation of needed resources. The article suggests that HQ needs to become more informed and preferably even embedded in the local innovation networks of its most important subsidiaries and that coopetition should not be managed solely on an HQ level.

Advocating a sheer ignorance perspective, the article pioneers in discussing the role that HQ plays in managing coopetition among subsidiaries in innovation activities.

We wanted to find out how infant multinationals originating from Poland enact opportunities in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries.

We conducted a comparative case study of four Polish firms operating in SSA.

We found that when entering SSA, studied firms employed effectual decision-making logic. Thus, their internationalization was means-driven, serendipitous, partnership-oriented, based on the “affordable loss” principle and focused on shaping opportunities in SSA, rather than predicting, analyzing and planning any firm-specific assets or capabilities.

We illuminated the nature of the means employed in effectual internationalization and the role of partners (“effectual stakeholders”) in this process. Thus, we contribute to a deeper understanding of how infant multinationals navigate extreme uncertainty in the emerging SSA markets.

This study investigates how the extant literature approached the issue of small firms’ international market entry enabled by digital platforms.

The paper presents a systematic literature review of the internationalization of small firms using digital platforms. It includes only empirical papers from Scopus and Web of Science databases, covering 2016 to mid-2023.

The study provides both (1) a descriptive analysis of the selected papers, encompassing their temporal and spatial distribution, methods, theoretical perspectives and the type of platform examined and (2) a qualitative analysis of the articles’ content in a narrative review structure, culminating in an integrated framework of key findings and suggested research questions on the role of digital platforms in small firm internationalization.

There is still a very limited number of studies addressing the phenomenon, with several scholars recently calling for further research. This paper compiles, synthesizes, analyzes and integrates the empirical literature on SME internationalization enabled by digital platforms, offering possible future avenues to advance research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the scope for action of local human resource managers, who are employed in foreign subsidiaries of multinational companies (MNCs), for implementing training activities. These managers are situated in relationships to headquarters and the local environment. Related to this is the question whether MNCs contribute to the local skill base by implementing training activities or whether they exploit the existing skill formation system.

This study focusses on German subsidiaries of MNCs with headquarters in the USA and the UK, France, China and Japan. The study is based on 107 expert interviews with subsidiary managers and representatives of local stakeholder organisations, such as educational organisations, chambers, economic promotion agencies and governmental bodies in Germany.

The study reveals that headquarters introduce general schemes for training. In addition to these MNC-internal trainings, local managers use their information advantage over headquarters to implement dual training activities.

The training activities of subsidiaries are dependent on the institutional settings of the host country.

Albeit dual training activities are laborious and tie the local managers down for the medium and long term, the future need of the subsidiary for adequately skilled workforce prompts local managers’ engagement in implementing dual training activities.

Subsidiaries contribute to the local skill base and do not act in a free-rider position, at least in the German variety of capitalism.

The study deepens insights on distanced relations within and how subsidiaries generate scope for action by using this kind of relationships.

The aim of this study is to understand how digital platforms and context-specific characteristics of China – such as swift guanxi – affect opportunities for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) entering this market.

This study adopts a qualitative approach based on a multiple-case study of Italian SMEs in the wine industry that have activated international activities in China. Primary data consist of 32 interviews with SMEs’ managers, local consumers and other stakeholders involved in firm internationalization.

The findings of this study highlight that in SMEs’ internationalization, the process of knowledge/learning on digital platforms takes place in a bidirectional way thanks to the interactions among multiple stakeholders, which activate consumer education and knowledge sharing.

While previous research has emphasized firms' knowledge acquisition in the internationalization process, this study incorporates both the consumer perspective and the firm perspective, along with considering interactions with various stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to create a model that compares the effects of product content differentiation and service content differentiation on small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) perceived importance of customer reference marketing in foreign markets.

A theoretical model is developed and tested through multiple regression and mediation analysis, on an effective sample of 188 Swedish SMEs.

The results show that foreign market business assignments characterized by differentiated services make companies relatively more dependent on relationship learning and customer reference marketing. By contrast, situations of differentiated product content correlate negatively with customer reference marketing.

Reference customers can function as vehicles for international expansion when marketing offerings are complex. The findings imply that in service settings, SMEs need to maintain learning regimes with foreign market customers to effectively use them as references to win new business.

The study applies a service perspective to explain the contingencies of customer reference marketing, particularly in international business settings. The study contributes to international small business literature and research focusing on service–firm internationalization by explaining the marketing mechanisms at play in the internationalization of SMEs. In so doing, the findings can enrich relationship and network perspectives of internationalization and add a missing link to studies on networking and internationalization.