Table 1.

Guiding principles for assessing the importance and impact of a proposed study

	Principle	Description	Questions to ask
For studies in new or underexplored research domains	1. Salience for firms, societies, and/or policymakers	Addressing issues that are important to firms, societies, and/or policymakers. Important research “can positively influence individuals and groups within and outside organizations…[and] advance theories that influence our society or resolve important debates” (Tihanyi, 2020: 329)	To what extent does the study address current and/or future challenges? To whom are these issues important? Why are these issues important? To what extent does the study capture the “bigger picture” or external dynamics?
	2. Urgency of the phenomenon	Addressing issues that are current or likely to become important in the (near) future. This enhances the potential impact of studies	To what extent does the study address issues that are perceived as urgent by the target audience? Are these issues likely to be(come) important in the future?
	3. Actionability of the findings	Employing an action-oriented perspective towards proposed research. Detailing how findings can be acted upon by the study’s audience. Studies that can be acted upon are more likely to make a meaningful impact	Who is/are the audience(s) of the study? How can the potential outcomes be acted upon by the audience? Is it possible to clearly describe the potential course(s) of action emerging from the study?
For studies in established research domains	4. Reconciling equivocal research streams	Addressing ongoing debates or equivocal findings in the literature. The extent to which a study is able to resolve ongoing debates in the literature may influence the degree to which it impacts subsequent theoretical discourse	What is the puzzle generated by the accumulated findings in the extant literature? How can the proposed study address this stalemate? How will this extend theory or change the theoretical conversation?
	5. Fostering interdisciplinary exchanges and engagement among scholars	Engaging with other disciplines. Studies that engage meaningfully with other disciplines are more likely to have a greater impact, because they increase scholars’ exposure to new ideas, theoretical perspectives, and empirical methods, which can be used to foster new insights and solutions to practical problems facing the target audience	To what extent does the proposed study engage with other disciplines? How may the topic of the study be relevant for other disciplines? To what extent could the proposed study benefit from the ideas, theories, and/ or methods from other academic fields to foster new insights and solutions?
	6. Elaborating and testing theoretical mechanisms	Elucidating theoretical mechanisms. These focus on the “how” question in research. Studies that elucidate theoretical mechanisms are important to the development of the field by adding precision to our theoretical and empirical conceptualizations	What are the theoretical explanations for the relationship between an independent and a dependent variable? How has this mechanism been studied in the literature? To what extent have prior studies tested the plausibility of the mechanism(s) that have been theorized regarding the relationship between two constructs? How can the proposed study explicate the mechanism(s) of interest?

Scholarly efforts to propose future directions for international business (IB) research have generated a timely and extensive inventory of potentially interesting areas of research. We supplement this line of inquiry by suggesting that an additional layer of scrutiny could be beneficial when advocating in favor of giving more attention to particular research realms. Specifically, we advance several guiding principles that will help IB scholars assess which research areas merit greater scholarly attention, based on their potential importance and impact. We distinguish between (1) research in new or underdeveloped research domains, where salience, urgency, and actionability are critical elements, and (2) new research in relatively well-established domains, where scholars may contribute to changing the theoretical conversations taking place in IB