Governance of international business activities builds on a complex system of laws, interests, power, preferences, needs, actors and resources, which differ in various markets. Therefore, the governance incorporates two levels, market and non-market level. The strategies required to enter a market need to include and match these aspects. Interestingly, there is very little research on the employment of these strategies and the respective interaction. The role of market intermediaries as governance structures and their role as inward internationalization partners of entry candidates has been neglected, we examine market intermediaries as “method of entry” that provides legitimacy, access and governance to a target market.

Market entry situation has attracted a lot of research interest from various perspectives, particularly on opportunities and entry barriers. Entry processes embody multiple levels of strategic decisions and activities, and often they involve many actors and stakeholders, not just a simple dyad between a company and target market. Thus, especially in a regulated business environment the governance of entry can be very complex. However, it seems that most approaches on an entry process do not present any holistic models to offer orientation; instead, the approaches have ontological differences and provide rather partial views on the phenomenon. Institutional and social network theory has focused more on structures, industrial marketing and purchasing network theory follows mainly actors, their resources, and relationships, whereby international business-related theories have focused more on economic aspects and their implications, such as ownership, location, internalization, costs of liabilities of foreignness, etc.  According to Javalgi & Wright (2003) the conceptual framework for entry to international pharmaceutical market has two elementary strategic decisions: 1) the choice of market/country to enter, and 2) the selection of the method of entry.

Thus, we argue that there is a need to shift the lenses towards the governing activities that enable and support entry, especially employing methods that build on market intermediaries. We ask: What is the interplay between non-market strategies and business strategies in the context of pharmaceutical business and market entry, what constitutes the enabled access? What kinds of actor networks govern the activities that take place in this phase where entrants vs. incumbent interests get interconnected? In particular, in this entry-specific interplay, what is the role of market intermediaries?