From the Special Issue Editors: Innovations for and from Emerging Markets

I n the last decade, emerging markets have become a significant feature of the world economy. The allure of vast new markets for growth along with fresh opportunities for low cost offshoring have goaded droves of global corporations to invest in emerging markets. In 2012, global corporations invested more in emerging markets than in the core economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan (Rapoza, 2013). Emerging markets have also become a platform for a new breed of multinationals. Many of these emerging multinationals such as Haier from China, Reliance from India, and Vale from Brazil have not only become formidable competitors in the global arena, but are making sizeable investments in the developed markets. In fact, foreign direct investment (FDI) flows from the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) grew from US$7 billion in 2000 to US$145 billion in 12 years, representing 10% of the world’s overall FDI flows (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2013). These developments provide new opportunities for management scholars not only to examine a novel occurrence unfolding before us, but also to uncover new theory or new patterns in management practice from new data. Our objectives of this special issue are rooted in such determinations. Our particular focus for this special issue is on the practice of innovation within the context of emerging markets. As such, we are mainly interested in innovations both emanating from developed country multinationals for emerging markets and innovations from emerging market multinationals developed to be introduced in the advanced world. We invited scholars working on these topics and selected a set of studies that examine different facets of this practice. In this paper, we not only summarize their work, but also place their findings within the broader context of what we understand about innovations for and from emerging markets. Furthermore, we propose certain broad directions for future research that could push the frontiers of our understanding of emerging markets.