International opportunity networks

Opportunity seeking has become increasingly important for explaining firm internationalization, but our understanding of how opportunity is mediated within international networks is limited. This study probes the concept of network-mediated opportunities and attempts to identify what drives a firm's reception of new international opportunities. Based on the notion of opportunity in the entrepreneurship literature with the network view on internationalization, we bring together the concepts of relationships, networks, capabilities, and opportunity in a structural model, where we hypothesize that network-mediated opportunity is dependent on networking capability. This, in turn, is positively influenced by network closure and relational embeddedness. We test the model on a sample of 200 Chinese firms. The analysis partly supports the model, as we find that networking capability is a mediating factor between relational embeddedness and network-mediated opportunity, but does not mediate the relationship between network closure and network-mediated opportunity; on the other hand, we find a direct relationship between network closure and network-mediated opportunity. The paper ends with a discussion of the results and suggestions for future research.