International entrepreneurship in internet-enabled markets

Despite the increasing numbers of businesses that are already using the internet to pursue international opportunities, and the latent potential for such activity from rising internet adoption levels, the international entrepreneurship literature has paid limited attention to the phenomenon. To address this gap, we review past research in international entrepreneurship, as well as the broader fields of entrepreneurship, international business, marketing, management and management information systems, to identify firm-level resources that are associated with the successful pursuit of international opportunities in internet-enabled markets. We identify three such internet-related firm-level resources: online reputation, online technological capabilities, and online brand communities. We develop a propositional inventory of the expected relationships, identify measures expected to be useful to future scholars in this area, and present the implications of our review for future international entrepreneurship research.

► A literature review suggests factors related to the pursuit of international opportunities through online markets.
► One factor is online reputation: online visibility, and the valence, volume and consistency of online quality signals.
► Other factors are strong online technological capabilities and an engaged online brand community.
► Managerial challenges include product over-standardization, rash foreign expansion and neglect of offline interaction.