New financing alternatives, such as microfinance, crowdfunding, and peer-to-peer lending, have expanded rapidly. To date, few studies have investigated the antecedents and consequences of these financing mechanisms. This special issue provides an academic foundation for understanding new financial options that entrepreneurs can now use to start and grow ventures. In the introductory article, we integrate strands of the literature on emerging innovations in entrepreneurial finance and provide a framework for a systematic approach to new research questions. We conclude with a discussion of the six papers in the special issue and demonstrate how they contribute to the framework.

Employing grounded theory based on comparative case studies of informal microfinanced businesses in East Africa, we build a theoretical foundation for studying the establishment and evolution of family firms in emerging markets. We show that East African entrepreneurs not only use both strong family and strong community ties to establish and grow businesses, but they also use strong community ties to counterbalance the obligations that strong extended family ties create. In addition, we show that economic informality presents opportunities for some entrepreneurial businesses but not others to cycle rapidly from opportunity to opportunity as they maneuver toward higher value-creating ventures.

Our qualitative research shows that when making decisions about informality, entrepreneurs in emerging economies purposefully navigate between the enabling and constraining rules of the macro institutional environment and the norms of the meso institutional environment. We show that: (1) informality is a multidimensional continuum along which path to formalization unfolds; (2) as entrepreneurs grow more successful they become simultaneously more attuned to the countervailing constraints of both the macro and meso institutional environments; and (3) informal firms and formal firms weave together an exchange system that legitimizes the persistence of informality. In the context of informality, meso institutions serve as the connective tissue which cross-link levels of the environment and shape the context in which entrepreneurs make decisions.

The world's poor may be the last great frontier in international business. International microlenders are increasingly tapping into this emerging opportunity by extending small business loans to millions of borrowers. However, to date, there is very limited understanding of this domain from an international business perspective. Using qualitative case studies developed in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic we probe the causes and consequences of high performance and business failure for microloan recipients. The analysis of these cases led to the development of six testable propositions focused on the behavior of borrowers whose loans populate the portfolios of international microlenders. Our research aims to lay a foundation in international business for future research on microlending.

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