Culture, international business, and knowledge systems minitrack

This minitrack explores the impact and role of culture on managing knowledge and designing and implementing knowledge systems within local and global groups and organizations. This is crucial for instance for internationalizing firms and already global organizations. Success of their international business operations and marketing is depending on effective learning and knowledge coordination. Our minitrack covers broad issues related to culture (sub- cultures as well as national cultures) and knowledge systems. We are open to all methodological and theoretical approaches and welcome papers as well as research-in-progress papers from researchers and practitioners.

The Internationalization of B2B Digital Platform Providers : The Role of Cross-National Distance and Digital Characteristics

Digitalization offers new opportunities and changes how firms can explore and enter new markets. Current literature has deepened our understanding of the internationalization process of digital-based firms, but it provides very little guidance on how the specific characteristics of digital artifacts enable and accelerate internationalization or of the role of crossnational distance and cultural difference. We use a longitudinal single-case approach to explore how a Business-to-Business (B2B) platform provider internationalized its operations from inception. The case study illustrates that the ongoing development of the digital service and the integration with new devices played an important…

Introduction to the Minitrack on Culture, International Business, and Knowledge Systems