I argue that the evolutionary paradigm which characterizes the International Business (IB) field is less restrictive than in the underlying social science disciplines. This greater openness of the field has facilitated a multidisciplinarity of approaches, and a creative internal variety of legitimate lines of research. While a shift from books to journals reduced openness and conceptual variety, this was offset by rising cross-disciplinarity. IB scholarship has combined diverse channels of knowledge in order to develop theories that connect different perspectives on the IB system. Thus, e.g., the IB and Innovation Studies fields have come closer together and influenced each other.