Page - 258 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

technologies to reach their customers outside the domestic country. Indeed, digi- talization has challenged the traditionalwayof entrepreneurial opportunity pursuit. With the help of new technologies,firms can better access to online communities, incubators, and accelerators (Glavas et al. 2019), connect with foreign experts (Sigfusson and Chetty 2013), involve in international activities without abundant investments (Coviello et al. 2017), and so forth. In essence, thanks to this trend, international opportunities are becomingmore available for thefirm than the past. However, as international business scholars have repeatedly underscored, practitioners should consider the unique characteristics of foreign markets while conducting cross-border activities. Despite profound effects made by emerging technologies, some differences between the home country and host countries still exist. Cultural distance between each economy cannot be ignored, and protec- tionism in trade andfinance has been strong in recent years. So, how international opportunities could be created and captured in a digitally enabled world? In this article, we aim at offering a conceptual framework by drawing on the research in entrepreneurship, international business, and digitalization to understand this important issue. 2 Background In order to systematically examine the impact of digitalization on international opportunity pursuit,wefirst reviewsomeassociated arguments in literature of both entrepreneurship and international business.1 Opportunity is a central concept for international entrepreneurship research in particular (Reuber et al. 2018; Oviatt andMcDougall 2005) and for entrepreneur- ship research ingeneral (Shane andVenkataraman2000;Kirzner 1997). Following Eckhardt and Shane (2003: 336), entrepreneurial opportunities can be defined as ‘situations in which new goods, services, raw materials, markets and organizing methods can be introduced through the formation of new means, ends, or means-ends relationships.’ As such, cross-border opportunities are assumed to objectively exist, and necessary knowledge is needed to pursue them (Foss et al. 2013; Shane 2000). Though indispensable role of opportunities has been under- scored, some scholars were skeptical about studying entrepreneurial activities exclusively based on the notion of opportunity (e.g.,Davidsson2015;Alvarez and Barney 2014). Empirical researches indicated that entrepreneurial opportunities cannot be automatically translated into superior performance (Wu et al. 2019; Hmieleski andBaron2008).To interpret the results,weshouldbeaware thatShane and Venkataraman (2000) have already insightfully proposed that there are 1We argue that to examine these two streams of literature is reasonable. It should be noted that, while the concept of ‘opportunity’ is central for international entrepreneurship (Oviatt and McDougall 2005; Mainela et al. 2014), international entrepreneurship was regarded to be the intersection of IB and entrepreneurship (McDougall and Oviatt 2000). Further, the analysis of ‘opportunity’ is a common theme for these two research areas (Reuber et al. 2018). 266 D. Song andA.Wu