Dear friends and colleagues,
We are delighted to share the first issue of Global Strategy Journal for 2024. It is available at https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/20425805/current. This issue contains papers accepted through the regular process and grouped around the topic of competing on the world stage.
Oksana Kantaruk Pierre, Raluca Mogos Descotes, and José Pla-Barber study how relational capital fosters Ukrainian exporters resilience through anticipation, coping, and pre-adaptation during wartime. Netanel Drori, Daniel S. Andrews, Stav Fainshmidt, and Le Xu offer novel insights on the reallocation in a firm's business portfolio amid foreign competition in its primary business, introducing the option of "flight to nearby places" in the conversation of real options under uncertainty. Aleksey Korniychuk, Marcus M. Larsen and Christian G. Asmussen develop a computational model to understand internationalization influences the search of efficient business solutions, suggesting that general theories of bounded rationality need to be adjusted to the specifics of global strategy. The perspective by Shaker Zahra and Ram Mudambi closes the issue by contributing to the ongoing conversations about the growing role of entrepreneurship in MNEs in the context of digital technologies and mobile resources.
The papers are open access, and you can get them by clicking on their titles.
If you are interested in reading forthcoming papers accepted but not yet published in an issue, you can find them at onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/20425805/0/0.
We look forward to receiving your best work for consideration for publication.
Best wishes,
Gabriel R. G. Benito, Stewart Miller and Grazia Santangelo
Co-editors of Global Strategy Journal
Resilience in times of war: How Ukrainian exporting SMEs enhance relational factors with foreign partners
Oksana Kantaruk Pierre, Raluca Mogos Descotes, José Pla-Barber
This study explores how relational capital fosters Ukrainian exporters resilience through anticipation, coping, and pre-adaptation during wartime. Motivated by the limited understanding of how SMEs face extreme crises, we conducted 19 in-depth interviews with Ukrainian exporters and seven follow-up interviews a year later. Our findings reveal a gap in risk assessment and contingency planning, underscoring the need for proactive crisis strategies. Communication, mutual commitment, and trust emerge as key relational mechanisms that enable exporters to manage cross-border challenges effectively in high-risk environments. Cooperation serves both as a coping mechanism and a driver of strategic adaptation, enabling firms to adjust business models, enter new markets, and sustain competitiveness despite ongoing conflict. This study highlights the critical role of international partnerships in resilience-building for SMEs.
Foreign competition and business diversification options
Netanel Drori, Daniel S. Andrews, Stav Fainshmidt, Le Xu
We examine reallocation in a firm's business portfolio amid foreign competition in its primary business. We argue that firms will tend to exit unrelated industries and reallocate resources to related ones, reducing option breadth but increasing the value of narrower options due to synergies that contribute to building defensive moats against encroachment by foreign competition. This sequential process is strengthened among firms with greater absorptive capacity who are especially adept at identifying these changes and reallocation opportunities. Data on 2,582 US firms from 1997 to 2019 provide support for these arguments. Our study advances scholarly understanding of real options under uncertainty. It introduces the option of "flight to nearby places," demonstrating how firms may seek to maintain competitiveness in the face of foreign competition.
The long-term domestic dominance of the multinational enterprise
Aleksey Korniychuk, Marcus M. Larsen, Christian G. Asmussen
Like all companies, multinational enterprises (MNEs) recombine their activities in search of efficient business solutions. While these ideas have been widely acknowledged in the global strategy literature, there is limited understanding of how internationalization affects the outcomes of such boundedly rational search. In this paper, we develop a computational model of search that allows for an essential property of the MNE-distributiveness of performance across multiple geographies-and show that, in a given market, MNEs can outperform more specialized domestic companies long term. More broadly, our work illustrates that adjusting general theories of bounded rationality to the specifics of global strategy can deepen our understanding of value creation across borders.
PERSPECTIVE
Leveraging the interplay of digitalization and mobile resources to promote MNE entrepreneurship
Shaker Zahra, Ram Mudambi
Powerful geopolitical, demographic, cultural, and technological forces are reshaping MNEs' markets, compelling them to be entrepreneurial in order to successfully adapt and grow. We argue that MNEs can leverage digital technologies to exploit their resources, especially mobile resources, to fuel and infuse entrepreneurship throughout their operations. By leveraging and exploiting mobile resources, digital technologies make it possible for MNEs to cultivate their entrepreneurial activities to create new knowledge, build valuable organizational capabilities, and develop new businesses. These arguments contribute to ongoing conversations about the growing role of entrepreneurship in MNEs, the value of mobile resources as a source of competitive advantage, the transformative role of digital technologies in the global marketplace, and IB theories on the sources of MNEs' competitive advantage in dynamic markets.
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Grazia Santangelo
Professor
Copenhagen Business School
Copenhagen
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