Page - 268 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

enabled world. By demonstrating how firm’s stock of both market-specific knowledge andgeneral knowledge can be enriched byusingDTs, practitioners are provided some guides with respect to the mitigation of risks associated with international activities. Secondly, as highlighted by the perspective of DTs as ‘disrupting force,’ the significance of experiential knowledgemay not be as important as how traditional IP theory predicts, because of DTs could disrupt the way how international opportunities are pursued.Thanks to these emerging technologies, newapproaches to pursue opportunities are introduced, which allow experiential knowledge less indispensable,but requires someadditionalknowledge intertwinedwith the trendof digitalization.Bydoing this,we offer some insights for practitionerswhich help to think about their design of businessmodels. Thirdly, our study also encourages practitioners to scrutinize how toutilizeDTs in their activities. Thoughfirms are nowadays extensively exposed toDTs, not all firms can equally benefit from digitalization. In practice, only a portion of firms could successfully take advantage of these technologies and achieve a favorable outcome. Our study emphasizes a few factors that theoretically explain the heterogeneity of the amount of knowledge thatfirms can accumulatewith the help ofDTs,whichoffers some illustrations allowingpractitioners to consider howDTs matter for their businesses. 5.2 Future Research Though some insights are provided by this study,we should acknowledge thatwe have only done initial works and several avenues can be considered for future researches. Primarily, since we are not ambitious to cover all arguments in this article, some very important insights in the literature may be overlooked. Fur- thermore, as IP theory, aprevalent approachamong international business research, was thebasis for developingour conceptualmodel, readers shouldbe aware that IP theory itself relies on strong assumptions of the firm and the entrepreneur. In general, entrepreneursareassumed tobebasically risk-aversive (Welchetal. 2016), and thus experiential knowledge becomes the cornerstone for international oppor- tunity creation and capture. In this sense,firms largely prefer long-termprofits and organic growth. Although some entrepreneurs are quite conservative in practice, other ones are not concern much with international business knowledge (Zahra 2005) and hope to pursue opportunities across the globe as rapidly as possible. Thus,whileour conceptualmodelmaybeuseful, theheterogeneityofboth thefirm and the entrepreneur is ought to be taken into considerations. Relatedly, in line with IP theory which fundamentally claims some necessary knowledge should be possessed for effective international activities (Welch et al. 2016; Sapienza et al. 2006), we take a more objective stance which assumes 276 D. Song andA.Wu