Introduction: From International to Global

Abstract

This introductory chapter addresses the wide-ranging challenges of global entrepreneurship and innovation faced by both East and West in an increasingly tightly coupled global economy. In order to do so, the sections and chapters of this book need to be set in the context of a 100-year trajectory which has transformed the process of internationalisation into one of globalisation replacing an economy of developed centres trading with the colonised periphery to an economy of nodes of both production and consumption within a global network. Internationalisation of trade can be traced deep into history, back beyond the Silk Road. The Western mercantile tradition developed around a set of technologies which Hirst and Thompson (Globalization in question. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996) argue reached a functional plateau with the reliability and regularity of the steamship and electric telegraph. While pre-First World War international trade shares characteristics with later forms of trans-national commerce, subsequent technological developments have created a radically different interconnected global economy in which production and consumption take place across the network of complexly interacting stakeholders.