For the past three decades, the IB field has recognized that regardless of context – whether the MNE, global value chains, entrepreneurial firms, or cross-cultural teams – the key advantage of working across borders lies in the potential to leverage differences for innovation. However, this requires recognizing that a difference exists and that it is consequential. Compared to differences in location advantages or organizational capabilities, linguistic differences have been much less recognized in IB as consequential. Recently, however, the differences across natural languages (German, English, Chinese) have been acknowledged in the IB field, and IB scholars have started to pay more attention to the challenges of working across languages and coping more effectively with them. However, as we will argue in this panel, far less attention has been paid to the rewards of embracing linguistic differences as a way of generating new knowledge and theorize from it.