Hybrid ways of organizing opportunities in international entrepreneurship

Twenty years ago Oviatt and McDougall suggested an international new venture (INV) to be a specific type of organization that is international from or near inception. The international entrepreneurship (IE) field has been widened to cover studies of entrepreneurial behavior on opportunities in other types of organizations, such as multinational corporations, micro-multinationals and re-internationalizing SMEs. The widening scope of organizational structures under study in the IE field, together with emergence of a variety of new ways of governing economic activities in present day business, opens up a question of the possible ways of organizing the opportunities in IE. In this study we aim to advance IE research that examines international entrepreneurial behaviors focused on international opportunities within various organizational settings and to question the taken-for-granted assumptions of organizing IE. The research question of this study is, how does the research in IE field uncover the varying forms of organizing international opportunities? In the search for an answer to this question, we review the forms of organizing in a set of IE articles published between 1989 and 2012. We find that, although IE research has extended its scope to cover a wider variety of firms and their sub-units, it is still limited in its acknowledgement and understanding of the more flexible organizing forms, such as network organization and various types of virtual and latent ways of organizing economic activities. Building on these observations, we articulate future research directions for study of the hybrid ways of organizing international opportunities in current global markets.