Page - 259 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

opportunitycosts to takeadvantageofanentrepreneurialopportunity.Opportunities are always intertwined with the environment where pursued (Young et al. 2018). Therefore, it is of vital importance to jointly consider opportunities and the context where opportunities are created and captured. To pursue opportunities in the global context, firms are supposed to decide on where, when, and how to create and capture them (Knight and Liesch 2016). To answer these important but related questions, internationalization process (IP) the- ory (Johanson and Vahlne 1977) provides us a useful guideline on which the current analysis couldpotentially rely. Inspiredbya series of case studies primarily conductedbyresearchersofUppsalaUniversity in1970s, IP theoryhasbecomeone of theprominentperspectives inmainstreaminternationalbusiness literature.2As IP theorymaintains,firms expand abroad in an incrementalway because they should accumulate enough experiential knowledge so as to mitigate perceived risks that prevents them from effectively creating and capturing opportunities in foreign markets (Johanson andVahlne 1977). In specific, Eriksson et al. (1997) divided international business knowledge into three conceptually distinctive forms, i.e., foreign business knowledge, foreign institutional knowledge, and internationalization knowledge. Thefirst two types of experiential knowledge, highlighting market-related knowledge (i.e., knowledge about customers, suppliers, and competitors) and non-market-related knowledge (i.e., knowledge about rules, norms, government policy and regulations), respec- tively, were termed as market-specific, whereas internationalization knowledge, termed as general knowledge, is associated with organizational structures for international operations, and thus characterized as those universal and versatile across different markets. The explanation for different types of knowledge is summarized in Table 1. The accumulation of either type of knowledge can be potentially beneficial for lowering perceived risks in foreignmarkets (Fletcher and Harris 2012; Hilmersson and Jansson 2012; Zhou 2007; Blomstermo et al. 2004), and thus encourage the firm to create and capture opportunities in themarket. Although IP theory was originally developed to study the internationalization pathway ofwell-established firms, subsequent researches have observed IP theory is also applied to new ventures (Lopez et al. 2009; Hashai 2011). In theory, new ventures are faced with great difficulties to pursue international opportunities, as they have relatively little experiential knowledge and should invest existing resources to create routines adapting to businesses in foreign markets (Sapienza et al. 2006). As such, their activities are largely constrained by insufficient knowledge introduced by IP theory as well. Therefore, it is theoretically and practicallymeaningful to investigatehowcross-borderopportunities canbepursued in a digitally enabledworld by focusing on elements of IP theory. 2Some evidence can support this argument. Johanson andVahlne (1977), as the founding article for IP theory, have been on the list of ‘Most cited articles’ of Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) (https://www.palgrave.com/gp/journal/41267/volumes-issues/most-cited-articles). As of Dec 13, 2019, this article has been cited for 14,099 times based on Google Scholar. Furthermore, Johanson and Vahlne (2009), as a revised version of the IP theory, have been awarded JIBS decade award in 2019. Pursuing International Opportunities in a Digitally EnabledWorld 267