SEJ Special Issue Call for Papers

SEJ Special Issue Call for Papers

Special Issue of Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal

INTERNATIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN AN AGE OF PERSISTENT DISRUPTION

Guest Editors:

Olga Petričević, University of Calgary, Canada
Christos N. Pitelis, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece; University of Southampton, UK
Stratos Ramoglou, University of Bristol, UK Catherine L. Wang, Brunel University of London, UK Shaker A. Zahra, University of Minnesota, USA

SEJ Co-Editor:

Yong Li, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2027

Special Issue Theme

Disruption has become an important contextual condition for international entrepreneurial activity. It refers to discontinuities in the global environment arising from socioeconomic, geopolitical, technological, and business shocks that create non-ergodic and uncertain conditions (Hitt, Arregle, & Holmes Jr, 2020). While such disturbances are not new, their contemporary form differs in scope and persistence (Roulet & Bothello, 2023). Rather than isolated or temporary events, contemporary disruptions are systemic and recurrent, emerging through interrelated shocks that that cascade across borders (Li, Li., Yang, & Tian. 2025). Those shocks – ranging from wars and tariffs to geopolitical fragmentation, pandemics, social unrest, population shifts, and supply-chain fractures – represent challenges that are complex, inherently global problems, and extending beyond the boundaries of individual organizations (Talebian, Fattoum-Guedri, & Molz, 2025; Zahra, 2020, 2022). They are also structurally reshaping the environment facing internationally active entrepreneurial firms, where past experience offers limited strategic guidance (Meyer et al., 2023; Petricevic & Teece, 2019).

The core premise of this Special Issue is that disruption is not merely a crisis to endure. It is a proving ground that redefines how entrepreneurial firms emerge, internationalize, and operate. First, entrepreneurial internationalization becomes a process of multi-dimensional disruption navigation. It requires real-time adaptation, resilience, and the ability to generate context-specific solutions in response to the shocks (Barreto, 2025; Galkina, Atkova and Gabrielsson, 2023). Second, boundary-spanning and reconfiguration constraints and opportunities, stemming from tightening and uncertain regulatory regimes, the rise of digitally intermediated global networks, and digital acceleration, exert pressures on entrepreneurial ventures to redefine how they internationalize (Luo & Van Assche, 2023; Zahra & Hashai, 2025).

Rather than entering foreign markets through traditional routes, these firms are now required to increasingly engage in continuous orchestration and recombination of cross-border relationships, capabilities, and digital infrastructures that transcend formal market boundaries and reshape the logic of internationalization (Zahra, Criaco, Petricevic & Hashai, 2024; Pitelis, Wang, Hughes, & Ambrosini, 2025). Third, as knowledge, talent, capital, and digital infrastructures increasingly transcend geographic, technological and institutional boundaries, this shift impacts how these ventures scale and sustain advantage (Davidsson et al, 2023). Timing is no longer about being early to internationalize, or choosing an ‘optimal’ juncture. Instead, it is more about the tempo and sequencing, e.g., when and how entrepreneurial firms pivot, exit or re-enter different markets under rapidly changing conditions (Kirtley & O'Mahony, 2023). Fourth, scale has become modular and elastic, shaped by digital infrastructures that enable simultaneous micro-internationalization and global reach without traditional physical expansion (Bez, Narbón-Perpiñá, Pundziene & Sermontytė-Baniulė, 2025). Location choices, typically treated as a function of comparative advantage, may need to be reevaluated. Entrepreneurial firms now face strategic location decisions to access regulatory sandboxes or geopolitical safe zones, effectively treating geography as a dynamic design variable rather than a fixed point (Raswant, Nielsen, & Buckley, 2025).

Together, these challenges mean that for entrepreneurial firms – ranging from born globals, international new ventures (INVs), digital platform ventures, scale-ups, family firms, to corporate spinouts – the internationalization process is no longer just about geographic expansion, market entry speed, or resource access. It is fundamentally about navigating strategically a continuously reconfiguring global ecosystem of disruption, and develop business models to build competitive advantage (Autio, 2017). This new era of persistent disruption also destabilizes the traditional assumptions of enduring global institutions and predictable cross-border transactions that characterized environments in which international entrepreneurial activities had previously occurred (Zucchella, 2021).

The successful pursuit of opportunities is no longer a linear process of exploitation (Ramoglou & McMullen, 2024). It requires heightened levels of creative entrepreneurial work – including introducing novel means–ends relationships, shaping ecosystems, building digital infrastructures, and orchestrating cross-border collaborations and capabilities in emerging technological domains such as AI, blockchain, and sustainability innovation (Townsend et al., 2024). Concurrently, the global diffusion of disruption reshapes the very geography of entrepreneurial opportunity. Rather than being a deterrent, disruption is also a major source of opportunity by creating affordances for novel forms of cross-border value creation activities (Ramoglou, Chandra, & Jin, 2026; Ramoglou & McMullen, 2024).

In effect, core questions are shifting from who and when internationalizes to how entrepreneurial actors adapt, survive, and reconfigure under conditions of persistent turbulence. Relatedly, attention turns to how they design new architectures of global advantage that cut across traditional national boundaries and multiple levels of analysis (individual, firm, ecosystem, institutional, regional or supra-national). Strategy and international business scholars have begun to examine such phenomena (e.g., Hitt, Arregle, & Holmes Jr, 2020; Meyer et al., 2023). However, IE literature remains mostly silent on how these disruptive drivers can be systematically integrated into core models of venture internationalization and growth, leaving key strategic levers underexplored. This Special Issue aims to extend the IE conversation beyond the traditional logic of early internationalization – toward a deeper integration with strategy studies and capability-based theories.

Special Issue Purpose

This Special Issue aims to examine core assumptions of entrepreneurial internationalization by positioning systemic disruption not as an occasional disturbance, but as the default operating condition for entrepreneurial firms, and exploring the role of strategy in this context. In doing so, it opens space for fundamentally different research questions - ones that foreground volatility, non-linearity, and complex interdependence as intrinsic features of the new environment. By reframing disruption as the contextual norm, we move beyond static models of entry modes, incremental capability accumulation, or linear opportunity recognition. Instead, we call for research examining how entrepreneurial judgment, strategies, and organizational forms evolve under persistent turbulence; how capabilities are built when time horizons collapse; and how value creation logics shift when technological, geopolitical, and institutional boundaries are simultaneously in flux.

Such a reconceptualization does not simply extend existing theory - it forces us to interrogate its epistemological foundations, challenging the business-as-usual, stability-oriented assumptions embedded in resource-based views, transaction cost logic, and even core dynamic capabilities frameworks. Moreover, this Special Issue serves as a platform for integrating disparate literatures - strategy, international business, entrepreneurship, and innovation, into a coherent agenda capturing the recursive and emergent nature of strategic international entrepreneurship in disrupted contexts. We invite theoretical and empirical research that investigates how micro-level entrepreneurial agency interacts with macro-level systemic shocks to generate heterogeneous and path-breaking trajectories. Ultimately, the Special Issue seeks to reposition IE research at the intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship, yielding insights that are theoretically groundbreaking and practically urgent for competing in a world where the pace, scope, and intensity of disruption show no sign of abating. The following questions represent a non-exhaustive list of suggested directions:

Strategic, Temporal and Value-Logic Reconfiguration in an Age of Cascading Disruption

• How do geopolitical bifurcation and regulatory fragmentation reshape opportunity structures for entrepreneurial internationalization?
• How do entrepreneurial firms experiment with and strategically recalibrate the timing of internationalization in response to unfolding disruptions? Do timing choices and decision rules differ between gradual and sudden disruptions?
• What are emerging forms of temporary, relational, or ecosystem-based advantage in turbulent environments for entrepreneurial firms that internationalize?
• How do the new realities of the global marketplace impact entrepreneurial ventures’ foreign market entry modes, and how does this reshape competitive strategies and modes of competition?

Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Orchestration under Disruption

• How do internationally oriented entrepreneurial ventures develop and deploy forms of strategic dexterity to orchestrate heterogeneous resources, partners, and knowledge flows across fragmented and institutionally diverse global ecosystems?
• How do digital infrastructures and interorganizational alliances reconfigure the sensing, seizing, and transforming capabilities and their microfoundations in IE, and how do these enablers shape the balance between agility and strategic control across borders?
• How do internationally active entrepreneurial ventures develop and deploy non-market and political capabilities to orchestrate resilience, legitimacy, and innovation within a polycentric, digitally mediated, and institutionally fragmented global order, and what strategic learning mechanisms enable effective navigation across world regions?
• To what extent do dynamic capabilities retain relevance for entrepreneurial internationalization in contexts of heightened technological turbulence, geopolitical volatility, and ecosystemic interdependence?

Knowledge, Talent, and Innovation Mobility in a Fragmented World

• How do internationally active entrepreneurial firms strategically orchestrate cross-border knowledge creation, transfer, and protection in the face of increasingly restrictive IP regimes, data localization policies, and digital sovereignty constraints?
• How does the evolving mobility of talent, ideas, and digital capital under disruption reconfigure the spatial and cognitive geographies of international entrepreneurial ecosystems and innovation hotspots, and with what implications for business model innovation and evolution?
• What governance mechanisms enable IE firms to build trust, coordinate value creation, and protect IP across fragmented institutional contexts?
• How is the strategic logic of international location and embeddedness evolving for entrepreneurial firms amid digital virtualization, geopolitical realignment, and shifting global value networks?

Submission and Review Process

Submissions should be prepared in accordance with the SEJ submission guidelines available at https://www.strategicmanagement.net/sej/overview/submission. Manuscripts must be written in English and formatted in Microsoft Word.

Submission Instructions:

• Clearly indicate in your submission that your paper is intended for the special issue on

“International Entrepreneurship in an Age of Persistent Disruption”.

• Submit your manuscript through the SEJ Research Exchange submission portal: https://wiley.atyponrex.com/journal/SEJ.
• For any questions regarding the content of the special issue, please contact the guest editors at:
  • Olga Petričević: [email protected]
  • Christos N. Pitelis: [email protected]
  • Stratos Ramoglou: [email protected]
  • Catherine L. Wang: [email protected]
  • Shaker A. Zahra: [email protected]
• For questions about submitting to the special issue please contact: [email protected] or SMS Publications Manager Cobretti Williams ([email protected]).

All papers will be reviewed according to the standard policies of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. We plan to have a paper development workshop (PDW) for the manuscripts that are invited for revision and resubmission to this special issue. This will be held online, and date of the PDW will be announced later.

References:

Autio, E. (2017). Strategic entrepreneurial internationalization: A normative framework. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 11:211-227.

Bez, S. M., Narbón-Perpiñá, I., Pundziene, A., & Sermontyte-Baniule, R. (2025). What entrepreneurial decisions enable the breeding of digital platform unicorns?. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. (online first) 1-33.

Davidsson, P., Recker, J., Chalmers, D., & Carter, S. (2023). Environmental change, strategic entrepreneurial action, and success: Introduction to a special issue on an important, neglected topic. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 17(2): 322-334.

Galkina, T., Atkova, I. and Gabrielsson, P. (2023). Business modeling under diversity: Resilience in international firms. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 17: 802-829.

Hitt, M. A., Arregle, J. L., & Holmes Jr, R. M. (2020). Strategic management theory in a post-pandemic and non-ergodic world. Journal of Management Studies, 58(1): 259-264.

Kirtley, J., & O'Mahony, S. (2023). What is a pivot? Explaining when and how entrepreneurial firms decide to make strategic change and pivot. Strategic Management Journal, 44(1): 197-230.

Li, J., Li., L., Yang, Z., & Tian, X. (2025). Managing disruptions in international distribution channels: effectuation, business model innovation, and channel resilience. Journal of International Business Studies, 56(3): 403-421.

Luo, Y., & Van Assche, A. (2023). The rise of techno-geopolitical uncertainty: Implications of the United States CHIPS and Science Act. Journal of International Business Studies, 54: 1423–1440.

Meyer, K. E., Fang, T., Panibratov, A. Y., Peng, M. W., & Gaur, A. (2023). International business under sanctions. Journal of World Business, 58(2): 101426.

Petricevic, O., & Teece, D. J. (2019). The structural reshaping of globalization: Implications for strategic sectors, profiting from innovation, and the multinational enterprise. Journal of International Business Studies, 50(9): 1487-1512.

Pitelis, C., Wang, C. L., Hughes, M., & Ambrosini, V. (2025). Towards a better understanding of the interrelationship between dynamic capabilities and international Entrepreneurship. International Business Review, 34(2): 102387.

Ramoglou, S., & McMullen, J. S. (2024). “What is an opportunity?”: From theoretical mystification to everyday understanding. Academy of Management Review, 49(2), 273-298.

Ramoglou, S., Chandra, Y., & Jin, S. Q. (2026) Opportunity Search in the Era of GenAI: Navigating Uncertainty in an Expanding Universe of Imaginable but Unknowable Futures. Journal of Management Studies, 63(2): 695-721.

Raswant, A., Nielsen, B. B., & Buckley, P. J. (2025). Space: a new frontier for international business. Journal of International Business Studies, 1-22: 605-638.

Roulet, T. J., & Bothello, J. (2023). An event-system perspective on disruption: Theorizing the pandemic and other discontinuities through historical and fictional accounts of the plague. Academy of Management Review, 48(4): 772-789.