ABSTRACT
Transboundary challenges such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, energy transformation and the Covid-19 pandemic put vast pressures on generating solutions. They also call for updated teaching providing the required capabilities for international business (IB) and -entrepreneurship (1E) students. This paper presents a teaching initiative supporting master's students to develop an overview of such contemporary and timely challenges and global concerns. The course, developed jointly by two universities and first administered in 2020 at LUT University, combines economic, social, and environmental sustainability aspects with managerial and entrepreneurial issues on IB, triggering the students to rethink and critically address ways forward. Students develop skills and competences to tackle complex real-life problems in collaboration with others, facilitating their entrepreneurial, global mind-set and sensitivity to cultural issues in IB. Thus, the presented teaching approach and course initiative contributes to theory and practice of teaching 1B, by presenting how key challenges in contemporary IB can be incorporated in international business education of universities.
ABSTRACT
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a crisis that has impacted international business and entrepreneurship globally. Many small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been particularly hard hit, yet many are also finding strategies to survive and even thrive in this "new normal". This chapter highlights the survival strategies of SMEs in the small open economy context of Finland where, alike most European countries, international trade has been restricted due to the pandemic. We conduct a qualitative case analysis of five Finnish SMEs across different industry sectors, describing the internal and external changes they have undergone during the crisis, and we also shed light on the strategies and contingency planning they have been employing in order to survive. From the results, it is evident that internationalization remains an opportunity for Finnish SMEs. We conclude the chapter by summarizing our recommendations for SMEs dealing with the current and the next crisis, while also considering the generalizability of those recommendations in environments less stable and developed as the Finnish context. © Hamid Etemad 2022. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on international entrepreneurship. The purpose of this study is to assess the future of international entrepreneurship as a field of research and to propose the main consequences for scholars and practitioners post-COVID-19. We examine the three main macro-level global phenomena (digitalization, ecosystems, and institutional support) that are impacting the consequences and repercussions of international entrepreneurship during and post-COVID-19. Specifically, we present arguments for the rise of born digitals as the predominant form of internationalizing enterprises as well as for the importance of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem and export support for sustaining international entrepreneurship post-COVID-19 and beyond. Based on the analysis, we provide recommendations for researchers on international entrepreneurship for potential future research avenues. The study also includes recommendations for policy and practice on public support of digital international entrepreneurship, small- and medium-sized enterprise export promotion, and ecosystem support. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Over the past three decades, the domain of international entrepreneurship (IE) has matured and developed into a field of study. However, there are still areas where both thematically and especially methodologically the field would benefit from more pluralistic approaches. Especially comparative IE studies have been suggested in review studies to provide substantial promise for added contribution to the field, and novel methodological choices based on content analysis and secondary data have been called for in IE research. This study aims to respond to those omissions in the IE domain, by conducting a comparative study of Finnish and Russian international entrepreneurship through a discourse analysis supported by primary data in the form of interviews of Finnish and Russian entrepreneurs. The COVID-19 pandemic arriving globally in the first half of 2020 provides a timely topic in which to conduct such a study. As a result, we analyse the discourse in Finnish and Russian media about entrepreneurship before (2019) and during (2020) the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in each country. We find both similarities and differences in the tone and level of the discussion, and surprisingly the interviewed entrepreneurs are rather critical of the media discussion related to entrepreneurship in the time of the pandemic in their respective countries. We consider the theoretical and methodological implications arising from these results and suggest that the IE field would benefit from the added methodological richness that content analysis and discursive research methods can provide. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.