Firms from transforming economies can leverage the characteristics of their location to develop innovative business models before internationalizing. This note showcases ByteDance's innovative business model for its TikTok app, which became one of the most downloaded apps globally. ByteDance used its large and increasingly demanding home market to experiment with creative combinations of business model elements to develop a unique business proposition that positions the TikTok app as a hybrid of social networking and video-sharing. In addition, TikTok benefitted from China's IT strength supported by national high-tech policy to an AI-based recommendation algorithm as a non-location bound resource. TikTok shows that firms from transforming economies can launch successful global products through business model innovation.

Firms are often criticized for their reluctance to embrace sustainability in their business strategies. Frugal innovation is a recent concept that represents a new way for firms to serve underserved customers in developing countries while also promoting sustainability. Based on three cases of frugal innovation at the grassroots level in India, this article demonstrates how frugal innovation presents a promising way to tackle some of today's pressing societal problems with new business models. We use a range of parameters for economic, social, and environmental sustainability to strengthen the case for frugal innovation. This article attempts to inspire scholars to consider frugal innovation further in their future research endeavors and encourage firms to integrate it into their existing business models.

We study two quick-service restaurant (QSR) chains based on regional ethnic foods that were launched in China and India. The products that these QSR ventures offered had hitherto been sold by fragmented street vendors who typically operated single outlets. Inspired by the successful business models of international QSR brands, these entrepreneurs developed business models to popularize their chosen regional ethnic foods in multiple new regions and grew their organizations to 1,400 and 300 outlets in China and India, respectively. We build on the recently coined concept of ‘secondary’ business model innovation (SBMI), which is based on inter-organizational learning, break down its constituents into creative and imitative, specify the mechanisms through which it is achieved, and propose that it is a specific case of the more general construct of creative imitation.

This study provides new insights into the role of subsidiary managers in the practice of global business models of multinational enterprises in transforming economies. Drawing on the global business model literature and through semi-structured interviews with a leading Norwegian maritime multinational enterprise in China, we have developed and critically explored a theoretical framework for uncovering how subsidiary managers understand and manage the tensions between the headquarters based in a western country and the subsidiaries based in a transforming economy. More specifically, when implementing the global business model in the transforming economy, subsidiary managers need to undertake effective management of structural, behavioural, and cultural tensions along with the global integration-local responsiveness dilemma. Subsidiary managers can contribute to solving structural tensions between the headquarters and subsidiary by undertaking effective market sensing and knowledge transfer activities to integrate the transforming economies into the MNE's global production networks. Meanwhile, they need to make effective relationship management to solve behavioural and cultural tensions.

In an attempt to respond to recent calls for better understanding the coexistence of multiple business models, we develop the concept of ‘multidexterity’ – the ability to develop, nurture, and execute several distinctive BM strategies simultaneously across different levels and functions of the MNC and its host markets. To illustrate this approach, we describe a European healthcare firm entering the rapidly transforming economy of China and facing regulatory constraints and ambiguities in the application of industry standards. This situation is a generic challenge for MNCs entering rapidly transforming economies, which they help in turn to substantially alter and develop. We argue multidextrous business models are effective entry strategies for MNCs. They also help resolve two conceptual limitations in the BMI literature: (1) the problem of environmental contingencies and (2) the interrelatedness of factors at the macro, meso, and micro levels. We address these problems from a practice approach. We provide some implications for the concept of multidexterity and business models and address managerial challenges and prospects in developing multidextrous organizations.

A chief executive officer (CEO) acting as the firm's transformational leader is typically viewed as instrumental to corporate entrepreneurship in established firms, but how exactly does a higher level of corporate entrepreneurship come about, given a transformational CEO's actions? We suggest that organizational ambidexterity can function as a core mediating mechanism between transformational CEOs and the observed level of corporate entrepreneurship and that the effectiveness of this mediating process varies as a function of critical contingencies related to characteristics of the top management team (TMT), the environment and the organization's design. Our empirical evidence, based on a sample of 145 Chinese private sector firms, and using three primary sources of data (145 CEOs, 506 TMT members, and 1,981 middle managers), provides support for a moderated mediation process. We find that the mediating pathway from transformational leadership to corporate entrepreneurship through organizational ambidexterity is not significant when boundary conditions are ignored. However, when environmental dynamism, TMT collectivism, and structural differentiation are included as moderators, CEO transformational leadership does affect corporate entrepreneurship via the creation and effective functioning of organizational ambidexterity.

We hypothesize that informal bank networks influence corporate credit access in China. Our sample comprises a panel of 515 corporations listed on China's stock exchanges with a total of 1,052 firm-year observations, holding a total of 7,009 major bank loans from 183 distinct banks between 2007 and 2012. Results support the hypothesis that closure in bank networks facilitates credit access. We further show that the positive closure-performance association offers fewer advantages if financial markets and the legal infrastructure are relatively well developed. Our findings contribute to an emergent literature examining how informal networks can productively substitute weak formal institutions, and how the interplay between informal networks and network embeddedness shapes individual and corporate strategies.

There is a paucity of research exploring the use of local facilitators in cross-cultural research in Chinese cultural contexts and the impact this may have on data generation and knowledge creation. Addressing this gap, this paper critically reflects on cross-cultural interviews in Hong Kong. The reflection is centred on the experience of interviewing as an outsider to the culture of the participants and later working alongside an insider. While insider and outsider positionalities are formed from a multitude of intersectional characteristics, both gender and nationality emerged as primary influencers in this context. This paper contributes to the methodologically oriented literature by making salient the complexities of deciphering the multitude of influences originating from the researcher's positionality in relation to research others. Specifically, this paper highlights how both insider and outsider positionalities generate different, but complementary data through the exploration of participant's responses. ‘It's a Chinese thing’ or comments equating to it's a woman's thing were used by participants to either limit responses or expand and offer additional information, and the juxtaposition of these responses with those given to an insider help to highlight what this might mean for knowledge creation.

There is a growing call to understand the influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on organizational outcomes, especially in developing economies. Given the strong link between organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and organizational performance and survival, on one hand, and the constant need in the literature to understand their antecedents, on the other hand, this study adopts the social cognitive theory to examine the relationship between employees’ perceptions of their organizations’ engagement in CSR and their individual engagement in OCB in Nigeria. Based on the relevance of organizational learning culture to both CSR and OCB, the study further examines the mediating role of organizational learning culture in the relationship between employees’ perceptions of their organization's CSR engagement and their individual engagement in OCB. We tested these relationships in a sample of 254 employees drawn from banking, oil and gas, manufacturing and service industries. The results showed that there is a significant positive relationship between employees’ perceptions of their organizations’ engagement in CSR and their exhibition of OCB. This relationship is mediated by organizational learning culture. The implications of the results for CSR, especially in non-enabling institutional contexts, were discussed.

Autonomy is a primary motive, as well as source of satisfaction, for those who start and run their own business. Autonomy is not inherent to business ownership – owner/founders must make concentrated efforts to achieve and maintain autonomy. This study aims to increase our understanding of autonomy by investigating how it is experienced, the factors that affect it, and the actions that business owners take to attain and retain it. We study these topics in the setting of an emerging market – Russia – and compare the outcomes with a similar study conducted in the Netherlands. Our cross-cultural comparison reveals that the way autonomy is experienced and attained can be viewed as an expression of survival values in Russia and of self-expression values in the Netherlands. We posit an underlying structural similarity by theorizing the level of experienced entrepreneurial autonomy to be the outcome of the balance of power and dependencies.