The digital transformation of international business: a conceptualization, multidisciplinary review, and research agenda

Digital transformation is not an incremental extension of globalization; it is reorganizing how economic activity is conducted and governed across borders. To explain these shifts, we develop an integrative framework that extends International Business (IB) to adjacent fields—Information Systems and International Relations—conceptually linking key dimensions of IB’s decision space to advances in digital technologies and evolving geopolitical dynamics. Using this framework, we synthesize insights from 201 articles across social-science disciplines and show that prior work, while valuable, remains fragmented, offering no unified view of how technology-induced changes jointly recast canonical IB questions and cascade through the economic, political, and institutional environments in which IB is embedded. We argue that IB must redevelop—rather than defend—core theories of firm-specific advantages and internationalization to account for platform-based competition, ecosystem orchestration, network effects, data governance, and rapid, platform-mediated scaling. The geopoliticization of technology further requires theories of geopolitical adaptability that explain how firms cultivate geostrategic intelligence, design adaptive regulatory strategies, and build resilient digital architectures amid techno-nationalism, data-sovereignty rules, and emerging AI governance. Against this backdrop, we outline a research agenda focused on (i) organizational digital-transformation trajectories, (ii) cross-border value creation and capture in the digital era, and contextualized analysis of digital transformation (iii) under rising geopolitical tensions and (iv) increasing sustainability demands. We conclude by highlighting reciprocal opportunities for IB to inform and enrich IS and IR, advancing a genuinely interdisciplinary account of digitally mediated globalization.

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-nd/4.0/ ).