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International Entrepreneurs (IEs) increasingly cross borders to internationalize their activities, yet the various motives driving them into foreign markets are insufficiently understood vis-à-vis the public agencies striving to attract them. Our study proposes a consideration of their interplay by contrasting the various mobility rationales of IEs with those of the investment agencies striving to capture their talent.

Empirically, we concentrate on firms selected for funding in the French Tech Ticket, a competitive program designed to incentivize international start-ups to set up business in regional clusters across France. Using a longitudinal qualitative approach, we conducted two separate rounds of semi-structured interviews with IEs, public agency managers, and incubator staff members using thematic analysis of participant narratives on mobility.

Our findings point to diverging narratives on mobility, with an overarching opportunity-centrism on the part of the entrepreneurs and a general location-centrism emanating from the regional agencies. These contrasting visions of mobility are not mutually exclusive but rather present along a mobility continuum that generates contrasting logics.

Implications for policy and practice are provided for the investment agencies crafting policies and committing resources to attract mobile international entrepreneurs. While past IE mobility may correlate with the likelihood of present and future movement, our dual settler-explorer continuum model demonstrates that a binary separation of explorers and settlers is too simplistic: explorers may be subject to settler impulses and settlers can still be drawn to exploration and nomadism. We also provide insights for IEs seeking support in their international development and mobility and the particular advantages a given host economy can offer by identifying an overarching proximity-to-distance rationale for explorers, including the common “host-as-stopover” intermediary rationale.

We theorize this incommensurability as an expression of the current complexity of international mobility and policymaking, revealing a “next-frontier” expansionism in cross-border movement that requires more deliberate consideration.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a tumultuous, emergent and dynamic new normal across all facets of society as strikingly illustrated in the field of education, with school closures affecting 94% of the global student population. Higher education institutions (HEIs), confronted with growing fears of long-term effects on academic outcomes and enrolment statistics, were compelled to reckon directly with the vast inequalities revealed through remote instruction. With the classroom’s intrusion into the private domain, the most vulnerable learners, specifically students with disabilities (SWDs) often avoided disclosing their disability due to fear of stigma, leading to fewer receiving the accommodations necessary for optimal outcomes. In response, many HEIs were obliged to swiftly move towards greater transparency, engagement, and proximity with their disabled student constituencies. The case of a French Business school presented in this chapter reveals that such a shift eventually resulted in increased levels of disclosure of the SWD population. We review the institutional response to student inequalities in the post-COVID return to campus and relate it to theories of organizational diversity and disability inclusion to better understand how, despite contradictory tensions, institutional shifts during crises can ultimately lead to better disclosure and inclusion outcomes for SWDs.