Entrepreneurial Learning, Knowledge Acquisition And Entrepreneurial Performance

Trans-generational growth and entrepreneurial spirit succession are important for family firms to maintain its innovation vitality and longevity. Successful trans-generational entrepreneurship is exactly the way to gain competitive advantage in a family succession context (Habbershon,2002). With a strong intention to transfer firms to next generation (Chua, Chrisman and Sharma,1999),,Chinese family firms are about to step into intergenerational transmission. A important questions that cannot be ignored in this process is how the family maintain its innovative activity to promote sustainable family entrepreneurship, and through this trans-generational entrepreneurship to achieve continuing growth of both family and business two systems.The bases and motivation of entrepreneurship behavior come from the "entrepreneurial spirit" of entrepreneurs, which consist of the entrepreneurial orientation basic proposed by Miller(1983) and Dess(1996). From entrepreneurial orientation aspect, family trans-generational entrepreneurship refers to the innovation behaviors (through establishing new ventures or new firms) of next generation to transfer entrepreneurial spirit and purchase trans-generational wealth creation in the family. Actually a lot of family firms have launched successful trans-generational entrepreneurship activities by the next generation. However, many trans-generational entrepreneurship behaviors may not sustain a long time and the death rate of new ventures are high, even survival, much of them will differentiate soon. An important reason causes this problem is that the role and characteristic of family entrepreneurs have changed much through Chinese 30 years reform process. Different experience, education background and entrepreneurial motivation of family trans-generational entrepreneurs forms different entrepreneurship path of these family entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs'entrepreneurial ability may have some innate endowment exists, but more important is the experience and knowledge cultivated in it, which means learning become a special mechanism for screening successful entrepreneurs (Li Xinchun,2000).The thesis discussed the second (next) generations'entrepreneurial learning in Chinese family firms and explored the knowledge acquisition and trans-generational entrepreneurial performance diffidence of different entrepreneurial learning, including learning from formal education, learning from experience and learning from networks. First, based on the literature review and in-depth interview of family entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial learning, this paper constructed a theoretical framework to study the impact of different entrepreneurial learning on trans-generational knowledge acquisition and entrepreneurship performance. Then this paper used survey data testified the hypothesis probed in the theoretical framework, and in this process, this paper also made some indicators measuring improvements.The findings of empirical studies suggested that family tans-generational entrepreneurs in China are generally in the post-reform period of rapid economic development, and their entrepreneurial activities are influenced not only by their parents and family business, but also by their experience and learning networks outside family firms. Meanwhile, they generally accept good and high level education. All these factors make these next generations'entrepreneurship behaviors are influenced by their various learning experience, which in turn makes their knowledge structure appears to be more complex. Through different entrepreneurial learning method, they gained different entrepreneurial knowledge and balance the relationship and interest of those knowledge, which formed different paths and performance of trans-generational entrepreneurship. Therefore, through entrepreneurial learning mechanism to analysis trans-generational entrepreneurial growth difference is not only important to indentify the key element affected trans-generational entrepreneurship in current Chinese family firms, but also with important practical and theoretical meanings. In this study, the diversification data and hypothesis of families'next generations confirms that the quasi-family business successor is no longer a passive family business manager of family business succession, but rather an entrepreneur with Initiative and tans-generational entrepreneurial spirit in the succession process of family firms. Main conclusions of this paper are listed below:First, trans-generational sustainable growth is a process need entrepreneurs' learning heterogeneity. The empirical results support the indirect influence of entrepreneurial learning on the trans-generational growth of family and family business. This section contains various learning styles, including formal and informal entrepreneurial learning, also experiential learning and observable learning. Entrepreneurial learning behavior is not limited to occur within the family, but also contains learning behaviors outside families. All these will affect trans-generational knowledge acquisition and entrepreneurship performance. In the learning process, trans-generational entrepreneurs behaved more active rather than passive self-protected. This paper also confirms the view of Corbett (2007), who suggested that entrepreneurial performance improvement needs of entrepreneurial learning asymmetry, not just the knowledge asymmetry. To understand the differences in entrepreneurial activity, we must further investigate the value and contribution of learning, which is the process for entrepreneurs of knowledge obtaining. Trans-generational entrepreneurs'performance difference can be distinguished through their education, experience and learning networks.Second, under the transition economic background, education is significantly important for trans-generational entrepreneurial growth of Chinese family firms. Chinese family business in transition economies experienced a series of changes, these second generation entrepreneurs undergoing a significant shift of social background and institutional change, which makes formal education become a key factor of success. Unlike the previous literature which emphasized experiential learning as the core of entrepreneurial learning, this paper found that in the highly market-based new knowledge economy, the vital important factor for these family trans-generational entrepreneurs is improving their capability of recognizing opportunity and coping with liability of newness through education. This is a new prompt for the previous study of family and family firms, which remind researchers to pay attention to the active role of formal learning in the entrepreneurship context.Third, in trans-generational entrepreneurship, experience has characteristics of path dependence and its role play needs condition. The impact of experience learning on entrepreneurial performance depends on the level of formal learning, that is experiential learning needs to be combining with formal education. Empirical research results show that, for the trans-generational entrepreneurs with different education level, the effect of their experiential learning are also different. More specifically, for highly educated entrepreneurs, their experience learning had a positive effect on trans-generational entrepreneurship; but for those with low level education, experience learning had slightly negative effect on trans-generational entrepreneurship. This shows that, in the new economic context, experience is no longer the only dominant factor of the sustainable development of entrepreneurs and family businesses, while the role of experience is difficult to separate from formal learning. Meanwhile, neither the self-experience (work experience and management experience) of entrepreneurs, nor the experience gained from their families (learning from family members), did not significantly affect trans-generational entrepreneurial performance, especially in some cases, too much experience will hinder the ability of entrepreneurs to identify entrepreneurial opportunities. This implied experience learning maybe has path dependence in entrepreneurship. As the next generation entrepreneurs highly relied on informal means and previous experience that embedded in the past situations to learn, it is often difficult for them to change when they face a new scenario. They often base on the past experience to presume current situations and this makes them hard to update and replace original knowledge. An effective ways to cope with this problem is to improve entrepreneurs'formal education level, which means through formal learning intervention to improve the ability of entrepreneurs to use his experience.Fourth, learning embedded in networks and the changing role of entrepreneurial family. Empirical results suggest that knowledge spillovers through networks is an important channel to gain entrepreneurial knowledge, and those networks can effectively compensate the lack of experience of individual entrepreneurs. However, different learning networks have different contributions to trans-generational entrepreneurship. As a unique network to provide knowledge resources, family can indeed transfer knowledge between different generations, but this knowledge are difficult to influence trans-generational entrepreneurship performance directly. This shows that although family relationship is an important and effective way to exquisite entrepreneurial knowledge, rely this channel only is no longer able to adapt current complex competitive environment, and family entrepreneurs will experience the process from reliance on internal knowledge transformation to external resources obtaining. The learning networks trans-generational entrepreneurs used emerged to be evolved dynamically from family networks to network outside family and family firm, including personal social networks of next generational entrepreneurs and also social networks of their families and firms. In this sense, an important element of family firms'sustainable development is to transfer their social networks to the next generation, although such transfer may be very difficult. However, once the social networks of family and firm can be transferred successfully between different generations, it will have positive impact on trans-generational entrepreneurial growth of family firms.Finally, learning from education, experience and networks have interactive relationship. In the last part of the empirical research, this thesis compared knowledge acquisition and entrepreneurial performance variations under different firm institutions. The results showed that learning from education, experience and networks have different effects with different entrepreneurship stages, firm scale and industries. As an exploratory research, this study preliminary found some useful and interesting issues can be studied in-depth in the future.Through the above study, this paper analyzed and tested the trans-generational entrepreneurship mechanism in Chinese family firms. This paper made some promotion and innovation of the previous studies both on research aspect and content. The paper also tried to improve the existing research to make up the deficiency ont content, research design and research methods. However, there is still much theoretical and empirical research room of this topic. As an exploratory study, this paper hopes explore the mechanism of entrepreneurial learning, and at the same time, to dig up some research objectives and directions of trans-generational entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial learning that can be studied in-depth in the future, such as the cross-phase effects of entrepreneurial learning.