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Purpose This paper aims to analyze how emerging market firms upgrade their capabilities by focusing on “uncommoditizing strategies” that enable them to achieve levels of international competitiveness beyond the comparative advantages of their home countries and serve markets with premium pricing, quality and reputation of products. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, the authors studied 18 Latin American companies across six countries. Latin America represents an ideal setting because many of these countries have traditionally developed using natural resource endowments, and their firms have tended to rely on these in their internationalization. To facilitate the analysis of each case and the comparisons across cases, the authors used the same analytical framework for the companies, identifying the sources of differentiation and cost efficiency strategies that enabled these firms to upgrade their capabilities and compete on the basis of premium pricing, quality and reputation. Findings The analysis identified a general framework that represents an abstraction of the actions taken by these companies over time. The proposed model consists of three main elements used to pursue uncommoditizing strategies: tropicalized innovation, global efficiency and coordinated control. Originality/value Recent research on emerging market firms has shown interest in how these firms upgrade their capabilities. This paper contributes to this stream of research by providing an overarching framework that not only bridged previous narrower studies but also explained how firms can develop uncommoditizing strategies to upgrade their capabilities. Further, this paper helps managers by providing a comprehensive yet succinct overview of the main strategies that they can use to help their firms to achieve international competitiveness.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to deal with the topic internationalization of higher education institutions (IHEI), in terms of the research they engage in. The main motivation for the study is to understand the role of researchers in the internationalization of the institutions in which they work through the academic activities they perform. Based on the assumption that each of the researcher’s internationalization activities leads, to some extent, to a greater internationalization of HEI in which it operates, the following question was proposed: Do researchers’ personal characteristics and academic activities affect the internationalization of their (higher education) institutions? Design/methodology/approach This qualitative study adopted as main methods a review of the literature on internationalization of higher education and in-depth interviews based on a semi-structured script with an intentional sample. A sample of 16 researchers was selected for interview using the snowball technique of sample selection. Findings The paper provides theoretical and empirical insights into the characteristics of researchers that influence the internationalization of HEIs. These include the researchers’ international academic experience; insertion in international collaboration networks; international co-authorship; and experience in international publications. These are the four main factors that emerge at the individual level (researcher) that positively impact IHEI. Originality/value The paper responds to a gap found in the literature on the underestimated role of researchers in the internationalization process of HEIs in which they work.

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