Page - 266 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

pursue profitable opportunities in the Far East. The idea of ‘beauty’ is historically and socially constructed, and the values are sharply different between the East Europe and China. Moreover, as small-sized independent business, Polish sellers have comparatively limited understanding with regard to China’s markets and institutions. To address these shortcomings, a group of amber sellers inWarsaw registered their accounts onWeChat platformafter observing awealth ofChinese clients sent pictures of ambers and sought for advice from their friends throughWeChatwhile visiting the store. By adding WeChat friends with Chinese buyers, these Polish amber sellers repeatedly interact with their customers, delivering ambers through the international express transportation.Someof themevenestablished theWeChat groupwhich allows to introducenewproducts and simultaneously receivevaluable feedbacks from Chinese customers. Because these WeChat groups are generally open for everyone, consumers on occasions invite their friends and relatives who are also interested in Polish amber to the group chat. Through the use ofWeChat, amber sellers expand the market scope by accumulating knowledge about the potential customers, which partially overcome the liability of foreignness (Zaheer 1995). Furthermore, these Polish businessmen acquire first-handed knowledge about their customers and competitors in China, aswell as significant information regarding values and habits through informal interactions, which allows them to design their productsmore popular amongChinese customers than before. EXHIBIT 2: Internationalization at home (DTs as ‘disrupting force’) China is one of the major exporters of world’s production. Although a growing numberoffactories havebeenbuilt inAfrica andSouthAsiaover the courseof last decade,manycompanieson theplanet still expect for the long-termprocurementof a large number of commodities from China. ‘Made in China’ is perceived to be attractive if price and quality are jointly considered. To explore reliable partners, foreign businessmen used to come to some Chinese cities such as Yiwu3 and Guangzhou, in order to search for necessary information about themarket and the institution.Managers and entrepreneurs in these cities are scarcely trained to speak foreign languages, and therefore, it spends foreign businessmen a lot of efforts to discussandmake thedeal.Furthermore, institutional voids inmanyplacesofChina also discourage foreign companies from collaborating with Chinese counterparts. As a consequence, even though a wide range of valuable opportunities could be possibly explored inChina,many foreign companies are blind to thembecause of possessing insufficient knowledge about China. In recent years, with the development of digitally enabled trading and payment platforms, there is an alternative approach to do business with suppliers in China. The exchange of commodities is realized through the cross-border e-commerce platforms such as AliExpress (www.aliexpress.com) and DHgate (www.dhgate. com).Thesedigital platformsconnect thousandsofChinese small businesses to the 3Yiwu, a county-level city situated in the center of Zhejiang Province of China, has beenwidely regarded as ‘world’s largest wholesale market for daily commodities.’Thousands of village and townshipenterprises thatmanufacturevariouskindsofdailycommodities are established inYiwu. 274 D. Song andA.Wu