Multinational Enterprises: Leveraging a Corporate International Entrepreneurship Lens for New Insights Into Subsidiary Initiatives

Corporate entrepreneurship has long been acknowledged as critical to multinational enterprises (MNEs), with dispersed entrepreneurial efforts involving subsidiary initiatives becoming increasingly relied upon. Yet despite the global context in which MNEs operate, the conversation has not fully embraced the extent to which many of its entrepreneurial activities overlap with internationalization. In this paper, we identify a set of opportunity phenotypes for subsidiary initiatives based on their market focus as well as the knowledge and capabilities leveraged to identify and exploit the opportunity. The recursive relationship between opportunities and dynamic capabilities is then discussed, with an emphasis on building a research agenda for corporate international entrepreneurship.