The evolutionary trends of international entrepreneurship in the past two decades: The state of the field in the face of COVID-19’s global crisis

Excerpt

The field of international entrepreneurship (IE) has accomplished a highly significant progress in the past three decades. A handful of articles were introduced in the decade of the 1980s and a few seminal articles formally introduced the birth of the newly emerging field of IE to the scholarly community early in the decade of the 1990s (e.g., McDougall et al. 1994, Oviatt and McDougall 1994), and an accelerated development followed, which reflected the true state of practice and scholarship then (e.g., Etemad 2004, 1999a, 1999b, Etemad and Lee 2003, Dana et al. 1999). The practically side of the young field experienced rapid growth as smaller firms such as born globals (Knight and Cavusgil 2004) the International New Ventures (INVs) (Oviatt and McDougall 1994) and rapidly internationalizing enterprises (RIEs or RIFs) (Etemad 2007; Etemad and Wu 2013; Keen and Etemad 2012a, b, 2011), expanded internationally at a high pace. The young scholarly field began to observe, learn, and further address the managerial, practical, and policy aspects of entrepreneurial internationalization, beyond those restricted to academic and scholarly research and publications. Understanding the nature of entrepreneurial internationalization, the combining related aspects of entrepreneurship and international business(IB) initially, and the lesson of affiliated, or complementary, fields enriching the young field later on did not take too long, mainly due to the use of relevant concepts and strategies of other allied fields by SMEs and internationalizing SMEs (iSMEs) over the years. These accelerated developments expedited the evolutionary pace of IE. As a result, IE’s orientation transformed into a highly functional as well as a multi-disciplinary scholarly field and held the promise of learning from the state-of-the-art of other field’s advances and lessons of the prevailing practice with minor delays. …