Knowledge that Transforms

What drives new ventures to internationalize from emerging economies to developed economies? To answer this underexplored question, we bring together theory at the intersection of international entrepreneurship and strategy in emerging economies. Focusing on intangible resources, we theorize that international expansion of new ventures from emerging economies is driven by their desire to enhance domestic reputation, to exploit their stocks of prior knowledge, and to explore benefits of incoming knowledge flows. We find support for our hypotheses using a cross‐country sample of new ventures from two major emerging economies— C hina and I ndia. Copyright © 2013 Strategic Management Society.

Resources play a vital role in the development of an entrepreneurial venture. For ventures operating in the public interest, the process of effective resource mobilization can be especially critical to the social mission. However, there has been limited empirical examination of the approaches used by social ventures to mobilize critical resources. We study two processes of resource mobilization—optimization and bricolage, and examine the antecedent conditions that influence a venture's selection of these processes. Our theory predicts that environmental munificence and organizational prominence have U‐shaped associations with the use of bricolage and positive associations with the use of optimization. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 202 technology social ventures from 42 countries and discuss implications for the social entrepreneurship and broader entrepreneurship literatures. Copyright © 2013 Strategic Management Society.

The economics of growth has shown that countries grow by better allocating whatever resources are at their disposal and by introducing productivity‐enhancing innovations. Strategic entrepreneurship plays a key role in this process by searching for, combining, trying out, etc., new resource combinations in the pursuit of profits under uncertainty. Institutions that support economic freedom allow such experimentation to take place at low transaction costs, positively influencing total factor productivity. We test these ideas on a unique panel data set derived from Compendia, World Bank data, and the Fraser Institute's economic freedom data. Copyright © 2013 Strategic Management Society.