The Who, Where, What, How and When of Market Entry

Abstract

This introductory, along with the eight articles contained within this Special Issue, highlights and brings greater clarity to entrant-incumbent interactions and tofirm movement– when entrants traverse market territories for the creation and/or delivery of offerings, where ‘markets’ include service or product categories, technology or resource spaces, industries, sectors and/or geographies. Collectively, this Special Issues explains that firm movement across market boundaries is highly consequential, influencing resource-capability mixes inside firms, interfirm relations, market logic and industry value chains, and of course, people, communities and even nations. Specifically, we develop a field-wide perspective of market entry by expanding on the framework of market entry that Zachary and his colleagues developed (Zachary et al., 2015) – i.e., thewho(players such as incumbents, entrants, suppliers, etc.),when(the timing and sequence of entry),how(the strategy, resources, capabilities, etc.),where(the space of entry) andwhat(product, service, business model, etc.) – to include two additional categories:complements(networks, platforms, ecosystems) andnon-market elements(government, political, social and cultural arrangements). We also summarize the eight highly diverse and insightful articles that make this Special Issue, and conclude with a discussion to highlight foundational questions that point to new directions in future research in this field. In sum, we hope to inspire scholars to go beyond counting outcomes (e.g., entry/exit rates, or profiling successful versus unsuccessful entrants), to consider contexts, processes and contingencies (e.g., cost, time, collaboration, competition, interfirm relations, etc.) and to discover boundary conditions that inform a theory of market entry.