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The literature on international entrepreneurship offers two competing views on why new ventures internationalize: (a) the nature of the opportunity pulls them international or (b) the founder pushes the firm international. While these two internationalization drivers are not independent, they do represent unique causal mechanisms. Previously, the tools available to understand the entrepreneur’s disposition toward internationalization were limited. The present study uses the theoretical foundation of the international entrepreneurial orientation construct and from it develops and tests an attitudinally-based individual-level measure of disposition toward internationalization. To ensure the validity and reliability of the new measure, termed International Entrepreneurial Orientation Disposition, studies were conducted to: develop new scale items, examine their psychometric properties and construct validity, and demonstrate criterion validity. A strong measurement model is developed using structural equation modeling (CFI = 0.93, RMSEA = 0.07), and the measure is shown to be useful as a predictor of perceived international venture attractiveness.

The authors investigate the durability of international entrepreneurial cognitions. Specifically, they examine how advanced business education and the Covid-19 pandemic influence international entrepreneurial orientation disposition (IEOD), and subsequently entrepreneurial intentions (EIs), to better understand the psychological dynamics underpinning the drivers of international entrepreneurship.

Against the backdrop of emerging entrepreneurial cognition and international entrepreneurial orientation research, the authors theorize that both a planned business education intervention (voluntary) and an unforeseeable radical environmental (involuntary) change constitute cognitive shocks impacting the disposition and intention to engage in entrepreneurial efforts. The authors use pre- and post-Covid-19 panel data (n = 233) and uniquely identify the idiosyncratic cognitive effects of Covid-19 through changes in the OCEAN personality assessment.

Findings demonstrate that when individuals' perceived psychological impact of Covid-19 is low, business education increases IEOD. Conversely, the effects of a strongly perceived Covid-19 impact reduce the risk-taking and proactiveness components of the IEOD scale. The authors trace the same effects forward to EIs.

This paper contributes to a greater understanding of the resilience of entrepreneurial dispositions through an empirical test of the IEOD scale and shows its boundary conditions under planned intervention as well as unplanned externally induced shock.

The study offers a first benchmark to practitioners of the malleability of international entrepreneurial dispositions and discusses the potential to encourage international entrepreneurial behaviour and the individual-level dispositional risk posed by exogenous shocks.

The study uniquely employs a baseline measure of all our constructs pre-Covid-19 to discern and isolate the pandemic impact on entrepreneurial dispositions and intentions, responding to recent calls for more experimental designs in entrepreneurship research.

This chapter synthesizes works contained within the volume and paints a picture of where entrepreneurial orientation (EO) research stands today and where it is likely heading in the future. From the necessity for better theorizing and measurement to new directions and context, today’s research into EO is setting the foundation for future research that brings greater understanding to what it means for firms and organizations of all types to be entrepreneurial.