Research On Network Evolution And Alliance Performance Of Business Incubation Ecosystem

With the competition of global technological innovation growing, thecompetition among technological start-ups becomes more and more fierce. Incubationnetwork aggregates the essential resources in incubation process, such as capital,technology, information, personnel, policies, which make up deficiencies in the formof a single incubator, and improve the incubation efficiency.This paper considered the incubation network as an artificial ecosystem. Basedon ecological theory, social network theory, resource-based theory, transaction costtheory, game theory and other related theories, defined the incubation ecologicalsystem, analyzed the ecological population relationship and the network growingmechanisms. Through literature study, large-scale survey and empirical study, thispaper explored the influential factors to incubation network evolution,inter-relationship of these factors and their impact on network performance.This research contained the following creative points:(1) Built the businessmodel of business incubation ecosystem. Based on ecological theory and relatedliterature, the model described the incubation network system formation process.Analyzed the ecological relationship between members at different stages of theincubation network evolution, and discuss the competitive relationship between theinnovation populations;(2) Built the business incubator ecosystem scale-free networkevolution model. Incubation ecosystem is an open, dynamic growth complex system,with scale-free network characteristics. Scale-free network model can explain thenetwork evolution and the technology aggregation growth process. Constructed andvalidated the scale-free network, and discussed the impact of central node gamebehavior on network stability;(3) Built the incubator ecosystem evolution affectingfactors model based on grounded theory, and empirical studies the relationshipbetween factors. This model studied the typical incubation network in China,summarized five main categories with significant impact on evolution of incubatornetwork, that are "network relationship structure","members’ adaptive behavior","resources coordination and complementation,""network external environment","network value-proliferation". Extracted seven key factor, namely "relationship strength","control","trust","members’ capability","fairness perception","knowledgesharing","environmental uncertainty", that affecting the evolution of network, andempirical research their relationships with alliance performance. Results of theexperimental research showed that the "relationship strength" has a significantpositive effect on alliance performance;"trust" and "knowledge sharing" act anintermediary role between the relationship of "relationship strength" and allianceperformance;"fairness perception" and "control" adjust the intermediary impact of"trust";"fairness perception" and "members’ capability" adjust the intermediaryimpact of "knowledge sharing".The results provided a new conceptualized model to understand the incubationecosystem evolution process, as well as the relationship of the influential factors ofalliance performace, in order to optimize incubation ecosystem evolution process andimprove the alliance performance.