A look into the future – The impact of Metaverse on traditional theories and thinking in international business

Recent advances in technology (e.g., the Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Cloud Services, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain), the shift towards digital products, and the increased use of digitalisation by firms have enhanced consumers’ experience and transformed how companies operate, create products/services, and offer value to multiple stakeholders on a global scale. These technological innovations have led to the phenomenon known as the Metaverse. The Metaverse does not refer to any one type of technology but is a broad (and often speculative) shift in how we interact with different technologies in the same space. In the context of International Business (IB), the recent emergence of Metaverse appears to make geographical, sectoral, and operational barriers less relevant, raising complex questions about how current IB theories can explain the world-spanning, sectorally fluid, and centrifugal behaviour of firms in the era of digital globalisation. In this paper, we obtain a critical understanding of the important opportunities and challenges that the Metaverse and the fluidity of digital technologies bring to the IB field. Specifically, we discuss how traditional theories can be effectively utilised to explain firms’ internationalisation, and adapted to reflect the new technological era. We propose a framework for new approaches to IB research to help advance research on Metaverse and IB, which can provide important opportunities for future work in this field.