Authors: Seyed Mohammad Hassan Shariatmadari, Mehran Rezvani

Abstract

International Entrepreneurship (IE) research is growing rapidly encompassing many industries and regions all over the world. Opportunity is the main pillar of entrepreneurship, and by definition, IE is the discovery, enactment, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities—across national borders—to create future goods and services. Hence, the importance of International Entrepreneurial Opportunity (IEO) becomes apparent. Since each of previous researches have been done in IEO areas were about specific industries and geographical regions, this paper intends to find out which industries and geographical regions have been taken into consideration more by investigating recent studies and in what areas there are research gaps. The main purpose of this research is to identify the orientation of researches related to international entrepreneurial opportunity area which has been done on published articles since year 2000 up to now in valid English-language journals and find the role of industry and geographical region on it by systematic review and meta-synthesis research methodology. Firstly, two variables are identified from articles which include industry and geographical region where the process of IEO investigation has been done. Then the trend of researches explored during defined time periods in order of frequency, recognized. Finally, we found that about 43% of IEO previous researches discussed manufacturing industry and about two third of them focus on developed countries. The most previous researches in IEO area were in Western Europe’s manufacturing industry. Most researches in knowledge-based area have been done in Australia and New Zealand while there was no such research in Asia. In this research, the extracted data analysis has been performed to summarize and categorize the identified aspects and variables in related researches with opportunity subject that are provided in six tables and then the orientation of identified aspects and variables in researches related to the subject in time trend analysis has been reviewed

Keywords: International Entrepreneurial Opportunity, Industry, Geographical Region, Systematic Review, Meta-Synthesis.