Entrepreneurial orientation and international scope: The differential roles of innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking

•EO exerts multi-faceted impact on firm internationalization through its sub-dimensions.•Resource-limited firms do not need to achieve high levels on each sub-dimension in order to internationalize.•Being moderate on innovativeness and proactiveness leads to lower international scope than adopting extreme positions.•Moderate levels of risk-taking facilitate greater international scope than either low or high levels on this dimension.•The relationship between EO and firm outcomes is more nuanced and non-linear in the internationalization context.

This research integrates the international business and entrepreneurship literatures by examining the independent influences of innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking on the ability of a firm to broaden its scope across international markets. For each dimension of entrepreneurial orientation, a cost–benefit framework is applied to highlight the trade-offs associated with different levels in the internationalization context. Based on a unique dataset of 500 SMEs spanning 10 industries, the results reflect the consequences of being “stuck in the middle” with respect to their strategic posture on innovativeness and proactiveness, but reveal a nuanced role for risk-taking behavior. The non-uniform and non-linear relationships from the findings contribute to a better understanding of when the individual dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation help or hinder entrepreneurial firms in the internationalization process.