Page - 269 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

opportunities are ‘out there.’ However, in entrepreneurship literature, another prevalent stance (i.e., creation perspective) denies this assumption and maintains entrepreneurial opportunities can also be created (Alvarez and Barney 2007). Althougha thoroughdiscussionof these twocontrastingviews is beyond the scope of this study,weshouldadmit that the topicof internationalopportunitypursuit ina digitally enabledworld can possibly be better understood if this creation perspec- tivewould be addressed. Afurther investigationofDTsas ‘driving force’andDTsas ‘disrupting force’ is another area which can be explored. For instance, scholars can continue to inves- tigate and identify other factors regarding how these emerging technologies facil- itate knowledge accumulation and change the relative importance of experiential knowledge.Moreover, aswediscuss these twoperspectives separately, someefforts canbe taken toexaminewhether andhowsomespecificcategories ofDTscanplay both roles at the same time. In addition,while our primary focus in this chapter is to explore how to acquire knowledge and how knowledge matters for opportunity pursuit in a digitally enabledworld, knowledge perspective studies have also underlined the importance of knowledge application (Alavi and Leidner 2001; Grant 1996). The ability of knowledge application by nature varies across the firms (Wu et al. 2019), and therefore should be considered as the boundary condition for the conceptual framework proposed here. 5.3 Conclusion There is no doubt that digitalization has challenged the traditional pattern of doing business includingopportunitypursuit in foreignmarkets. Past studies haveoffered manyvaluable insightswith regard to internationalopportunitycreationandcapture in a digitally enabled world, but they are generally scattered and fragmented. Drawing on entrepreneurship literature and IB literature, this study develops a conceptual frameworkandaddsknowledge to the literature bycategorizing the role ofDTs into twoperspectives, that is,DTs as ‘driving force’ andDTsas ‘disrupting force.’We hope this framework is instrumental and could potentially serve as a guide for future researches. Acknowledgements The authorswish to thankMatHughes,MariuszSoltanifar andLutzGöcke for their valuable feedback on the early version of the manuscript, and participants at the Colearning seminar for their comments. This work is supported by theNational Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71572174, 71972166) and the National Social Science Foun- dation of China (Grant No. 17ZDA050). Pursuing International Opportunities in a Digitally EnabledWorld 277