ISSN: 2226-3624
Open access
The rapid expansion of the digital economy has transformed the landscape of global innovation and entrepreneurship, reshaping how entrepreneurial activities emerge, scale, and internationalize. While a growing body of research has examined the relationship between digitalization and international entrepreneurship, existing studies remain fragmented and often emphasize either opportunities or challenges in isolation, limiting a comprehensive understanding of how digital entrepreneurship evolves over time within international business contexts. Drawing on an evolutionary review of 39 peer-reviewed studies published between 2015 and 2025, this article synthesizes insights from the international business, entrepreneurship, and digital innovation literatures and traces the shift from early optimism surrounding digital capabilities as enablers of rapid internationalization to more recent concerns with platforms, ecosystems, governance, and inequality. Rather than portraying digitalization as a uniformly enabling force, the analysis highlights how opportunities and challenges co-evolve, shaped by technological change, institutional environments, and entrepreneurial agency. The findings suggest that digital technologies simultaneously lower certain barriers to international market entry while introducing new forms of dependency, regulatory complexity, and risk, challenging simplified assumptions of frictionless digital internationalization. By adopting an evolutionary perspective, this review contributes to a more coherent understanding of global innovation and entrepreneurship in the digital economy and outlines promising directions for future research that address dynamic processes, contextual variation, and emerging digital technologies.
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