Global Corporate Ventures: A New Trend of International Corporate Entrepreneurship

Two hot topics today in the popular press as well as academic literature are international entrepreneurship and corporate entrepreneurship. These topics challenge two traditional notions within those fields: the difficulty of established corporations to be entrepreneurial and the difficulty of entrepreneurs to go global. The current study introduces the concept global corporate ventures, which merges the concepts internal corporate ventures and "born globals." This concept is developed and illustrated by two examples of global corporate ventures-ING Direct and HSBC Direct, two financial services e-commerce ventures that have been launched on a global scale.