Years ago, while working in mainland China, Rob Pidduck found himself watching colleagues and acquaintances wrestle with the challenges of adapting to a new culture. Some thrived, quickly adjusting to unfamiliar norms and business practices. Others struggled to find their footing.
The ability to adapt to subtle, cultural differences in communication – something as simple as explicitly using (or not using!) the word “no” – often meant the difference between a successful sales conversation and one that went nowhere.
“Living abroad, especially in culturally distant places, pushes us to rethink the solutions to old problems in novel ways,” said Pidduck, who is originally from the United Kingdom and moved to the U.S. for his doctoral program. “It made me wonder how some individuals seem to lean into uncertainty to generate opportunities, while others pull back.”
That question would stay with him and eventually become the foundation of his research. Today, Pidduck is an assistant professor of Entrepreneurship at Old Dominion 91Ƶ’s Strome College of Business and was recently named for the first time as one of the world’s top 2 percent of researchers, according to a 2025 ranking by Stanford 91Ƶ.
His work explores the psychology of entrepreneurship, digging into how people develop the spirit and skillset needed to take risks, innovate and succeed in uncertain environments. “We can develop the dispositions to make us better prepared for uncertainty,” Pidduck said, explaining that in an era of data overload, overly analytical thinking can trap us in “analysis paralysis.”
For entrepreneurs, this is often the kiss of death, as decisions need to be made fast. Rather, heuristics-based thinking primes us to quickly spot important patterns in highly complex and uncertain contexts and biases us towards habitual action.
When applied to businesses, Pidduck’s research finds that large, multinational companies can use the international experience of their employees to make them generally more entrepreneurial executives, adept at generating creative ideas. These cross-cultural experiences cultivate a distinct set of learnable skills, Pidduck and his co-authors found, as well as reshape decision making and perception.
In his most recent publication, featured in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, a Financial Times Top 50 journal, Pidduck examined how social class origin influences risk-taking. The study shows that formative experiences, such as family background, can have a lasting impact on how entrepreneurial people approach opportunities and uncertainty later in life.
Now in his sixth year at ODU, Pidduck’s recognition among the top researchers worldwide highlights both the rigor and real-world relevance of his work. Through his research and his role as director of the Hudgins Transitional Entrepreneurship Lab at the Strome College of Business, Pidduck continues to shed light on the human side of entrepreneurship: why people start businesses, how they persevere through challenges and what enables them to succeed.
“At its core, my research is about understanding the psychology behind entrepreneurship,” Pidduck said. “It’s about more than economics and performance metrics—it’s about the mindset that drives people to embrace uncertainty to solve problems that improve all of our lives, however modest or grand the commercial scale may be.”
Pidduck’s work, applied to the classroom and the boardroom, helps people understand that entrepreneurial skills aren’t just about founding a startup. But rather, ‘being entrepreneurial’ is a learnable toolkit for approaching one’s work—and indeed, life—in new, value-creating ways. Critically, Pidduck’s work has demonstrated that this can be broken down and studied scientifically. By recognizing how experiences like travel, cultural immersion or even childhood environments shape decision-making, organizations can better develop the next generation of innovators.
Photo Caption: Rob Pidduck is an assistant professor of Entrepreneurship at Old Dominion 91Ƶ’s Strome College of Business.