Behind Emerging Market Firms’ Internationalization, Diversification, and Innovation: A Geographic Relational Approach
采用模糊集定性比较分析，研究新兴市场企业如何通过多种国际化路径实现多元化或创新，并识别出五种地理关系配置类型。
The internationalization of emerging market firms (EMFs) has attracted substantial research attention. Yet, how EMFs engage in diversification and innovation during internationalization remains underexplored. Drawing insights from a geographic relational perspective, we perform a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) on a sample of EMFs. Our findings suggest that EMFs can choose from multiple equifinal internationalization pathways to capture growth opportunities in diversification and/or innovation. These new insights emphasize that achieving diversification or innovation requires a combination of organizational contextuality, international path dependence, and geographic practice attributes. We further develop a taxonomy of five EMFs’ geographic relational configurations for diversification and/or innovation: entrenching specialist, niche explorer, global adapter, transnational agent, and strategic aspirant. Overall, by unleashing the power of configurational analysis, this paper reveals what is behind the intriguing internationalization of EMFs with a focus on diversification and innovation.