Hidden champions are highly successful companies operating in niche market segments, playing a key role in global supply chains. Recently, the Chinese government has launched a national strategy for supporting hidden champions, to strengthen their innovativeness and financial performance: nonetheless, it is still unclear what is driving their networking strategies. In this study, we investigate Chinese hidden champions’ mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances, to understand if they are influenced by specific geographical, institutional, and industry-related drivers. By using secondary data from Orbis M&A and the list of hidden champions published by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, we focus on the mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures established between 2013 and 2023 in China. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is then used to assess how business deals are impacted by geographical, institutional, and industry-related drivers. Overall, they tend to establish large deals with companies in the same province, belonging to the same industry, and potentially close to a Special Economic Zone; however, when it comes to create connections with other hidden champions the first two drivers have a negative impact on the deal value.

Outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) has been recognised as a driving force of learning and innovation for emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs). Recently, the emergence of global value chains (GVCs) has shifted focus from final goods to intermediate tasks, potentially reshaping OFDI patterns and outcomes. However, little has been written about the role of GVCs in the OFDI-innovation nexus. Based on upgrading and governance perspectives, the paper investigates questions whether innovation outcome varies with the GVC types of OFDI projects and whether governance relations within GVCs affect OFDI-to-innovation mechanisms, both theoretically and empirically. Results based on data from over 4000 listed Chinese firms containing 314 MNEs show that high-value-added OFDI leads to a greater increase in innovation, compared with low-value-added OFDI. When Chinese MNEs have foreign capital, the positive effect of high-value-added OFDI is amplified but low-value-added OFDI may even hinder innovation. The negative impact, however, vanishes if foreign firms do not hold Chinese MNEs’ capital directly. These findings encourage EMNEs to leverage high-value-added OFDI projects to enhance innovation, but they should exercise caution regarding direct participation of foreign capital when undertaking low-value-added projects, as EMNEs may be governed to cater to foreign investors’ interests and stuck in innovation bottlenecks.

How do recurrent cross-border acquisitions (CBAs) by emerging market MNEs (EMNEs) enable capability upgrading? Despite significant growth in the extant literature on EMNE internationalization via CBAs, we possess no clear answer to this fundamental question. Drawing on the springboard perspective and the literature on the temporal perspective of organizational strategy we find that CBAs positively affect EMNEs’ technological capability. However, this relationship is non-linear and is contingent upon the speed and regularity of acquisitions. Backed by these findings, our study not only tests and extends the central thesis of the springboard perspective but also provides important implications for managerial action.

How are African Multinational Banks (AMBs) strategically approaching the challenge of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? And what is the role of legitimacy and internationalization performance in achieving this objective? We build a model to test the moderating role of legitimization and internationalization performance in adopting SDGs for a set of Moroccan Banks expanding into the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). Data collected from banks’ published reports crossed with coded data from interviews and survey questionnaires point to the importance of legitimation but do not support typical strategies as significant along the banking expansion process.