Mobility creates reach, ecosystems determine conversion: Founder educational mobility and international engagement

Abstract

Founder educational mobility is often treated as a channel through which entrepreneurs access non-local knowledge, networks, and opportunities. Yet mobility may not automatically translate into international market engagement. The key insight of our study is that mobility creates potential reach, but sub-regional ecosystems determine whether that reach is converted into international market engagement. We develop ecosystem convertibility, defined as the extent to which local networks, support institutions, and external demand linkages enable firms to transform founder educational mobility into international engagement. Using a 2015–2020 panel of 2260 firm-year observations from 517 technology-oriented firms supported by the Innovative Research in Small Business Program (PIPE) in São Paulo, Brazil, we examine export and import engagement across sub-regional hubs. Logistic models show that founder educational mobility alone does not consistently predict international engagement, whereas its interaction with ecosystem convertibility is positive and significant, especially for export engagement. This result also holds for export engagement when convertibility is recalculated using networks and institutions only, excluding external demand. Descriptive checks show a highly skewed mobility distribution and a low export base rate, so the export results are interpreted cautiously. A machine-learning diagnostic is reported as a secondary predictive check rather than causal evidence. The paper contributes to entrepreneurship research by shifting attention from whether founder educational mobility matters to when and where mobility becomes productive. For practice, the results imply that internationalization policy should strengthen the sub-regional mechanisms that convert mobility into market access.