The role of managerial-level, firm-level and institutional factors in opportunity recognition of cross-border business: The case of transnational immigrant entrepreneurs in Malaysia

Immigrant entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly important for economic growth and regional development. Consequently, the increasingly rapid developments in the field of immigrant entrepreneurs have led to the discovery of a new subset named transnational immigrant entrepreneurs. However, no specific research has been done about factors driving transnational immigrant entrepreneurs to establish a cross - border businesses, particularly in Malaysia. Therefore, this research seeks to fill the gap to capture the multifaceted and multilevel nature of transnational immigrant entrepreneurship by investigating How and why do transnational immigrant entrepreneurs establish a cross - border businesses in Malaysia. A framework includes research on the managerial level, firm level, institutional factors, and opportunity recognition by integrating born global theory, social network theory, resource-based view, and institutional theory to explain the holistic point of view of the framework. This research employed a qualitative phenomenological approach by using individuals as the primary unit of analysis by interviewing nine transnational immigrant entrepreneurs. This study employed NVivo software in the systematic coding and analysis of the interviews resulting in sixteen key themes. The findings have confirmed six themes: foreign language, knowledge of employees, desirable product, social ties, ethnic ties, and kinship. In addition, ten newly found themes were revealed: prior working experience, host country language, unique product, customer capital, government capital, awareness of legal administration and regulatory policies, discrimination, conflict, identity work, and migration experience. Consequently, the revisited framework has been restructured to capture the newly found themes, which could be seen as a humble contribution to the body of knowledge. Finally, the findings highlighted the major theoretical and practical implications, recommendations, limitations, and directions for future studies.