Entrepreneurial adaptability in Cross-border startups: Navigating institutional voids in developing business environments

The rise of cross-border startups operating in emerging and underdeveloped economies underscores a new wave of entrepreneurial dynamism amid regulatory complexity and infrastructural constraints. Yet, these ventures often confront institutional voids—gaps in legal frameworks, market intermediaries, and support infrastructure—that pose significant challenges to scalability, legitimacy, and operational stability. Entrepreneurial adaptability, defined as the capacity to reconfigure strategies and resource bases in response to volatile environments, becomes a critical survival and growth mechanism in such contexts. This article explores how cross-border entrepreneurs dynamically adjust to institutional discontinuities in developing markets by employing strategic improvisation, localized learning, and agile business model innovation. It synthesizes insights from institutional theory and entrepreneurial resilience to frame adaptability as a multidimensional capability involving cultural intelligence, regulatory navigation, and partnership leveraging. The study examines real-world startup cases from sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, highlighting how founders tailor solutions to unstructured markets, navigate informal economies, and mitigate uncertainty through digital infrastructure and decentralized operations. Additionally, the research identifies key patterns in how startups reconfigure value propositions, funding approaches, and governance practices to align with fluid institutional landscapes. The role of diasporic linkages, transnational knowledge spillovers, and flexible legal incorporation strategies is analyzed as enablers of cross-border scalability. The article concludes by proposing a strategic adaptability framework for entrepreneurs entering institutionally thin environments, emphasizing adaptive capacity as a competitive advantage in global entrepreneurship.