In their paper “See Paris and… found a business? The impact of cross-cultural experience on opportunity recognition capabilities”, Prof. Nikolaus Franke and Dr. Peter Vandor find that cross-cultural experiences may increase individuals’ capabilities to identify promising business ideas. By living in different cultures, they encounter new products, services, customer preferences, and communication strategies, and this exposure may allow the transfer of knowledge about customer problems or solutions from one country to another.

The paper’s results sparked broad interests, even outside the boundaries of research. The paper appeared in the Krone, Austria’s largest newspaper and apparently, someone made a YouTube Video out of it.

E&I is always pleased to see its impact.

If this sparked your interest as well, you can find the links below:

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUYQ0XStv1w

Newspaper article https://www.wu.ac.at/entrep/news-impact/in-the-media/2019/how-to-create-unicorns-in-romania-there-is-only-one-way-having-many-innovative-start-ups-austrian-mba-professor-says-1

HBR article https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-are-immigrants-more-entrepreneurial

Research article in the Journal of Business Venturing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883902616300052