Research On Business Growth Ability Of China Construction Enterprises

Construction industry is a labor-intensive, capital-intensive and technology-intensive industry, playing an important role in national economy. China's construction enterprises have made significant progress over the past two decades, and their international competitiveness is gradually improving. And the increasingly prosperous national economy, the support of polices, as well as the expansion of international market followed by China's entry into the WTO have created valuable historical opportunities for the further development of China's construction enterprises. Therefore, how to enable China's construction enterprises to grow healthily, orderly and in a sustainable way has become a topic of great concern in the construction industry.In terms of existing theories, neither the neoclassic economics theory, nor the new institutional economics theory, the theory on the growth of corporate competition strategy, or the theory on the growth of business abilities can satisfactorily explain the healthy, orderly and sustainable growth of construction enterprises. Chapter Two has put forward the concept of the growth ability of construction enterprises based on the connotation of the growth of construction enterprises and the concept of the business growth ability, and has analyzed and tested the factors influencing the growth ability of construction enterprises using the structure equation model. By analyzing the influencing factors, the author believes that the growth ability of construction enterprises can be divided into four sub-abilities—the market development ability, the organizational management ability, the technology innovation ability, and the networking & cooperation ability; and by testing the theory through modeling, the article has obtained the cross-influencing relationship between the four sub-abilities. Further on, the article has analyzed the connotations of the four sub-abilities as well as the factors influencing each of them.Fundamentally, the forming of the growth ability of construction enterprises is a process of integrating knowledge into workflows. Chapter Three of the article points out, in coping with the change of external environment, a construction enterprise will integrate knowledge into the market development flow, the organizational management flow, the technology innovation flow, and the networking & cooperation flow along the experience loop and the innovation loop through organizational memory as well as organizational learning and interaction at three levels—the corporate level, the project level, and the inter-organization level. The combination of the four flows will form the growth ability of the construction enterprise. Actually, the combination process of the above-mentioned four sub-flows is the combination process of the four sub-abilities of the growth ability of construction enterprises. This article has used the genetic model in biology to analyze the combination of the four sub-abilities, so as to explain the combination process in the eventual formation of the growth ability of construction enterprises. Furthermore, using the genetic model, the article has also explained the characteristics of construction enterprises in different stages of their growth.The growth of construction enterprises is a long-term process, including two aspects-growth direction and growth speed. Among them, in terms of growth direction, growth can be divided into longitudinal integrated growth and latitudinal integrated growth from the industry chain perspective; and growth speed refers to the development speed of construction enterprises in certain direction. But the growth of construction enterprises is not a straight rising process; instead, certain force will keep growing inside and outside them, and this force will produce vibration in the enterprises, putting them in a long-term chaotic state, and even forming an "upper limit of growth". Chapter Four of the article has explained the intrinsic action mechanism of the growth ability of construction enterprises by building the dynamic model, the chaos model and the model to breakthrough the "upper limit of growth". The growth ability has decided the growth direction and speed of construction enterprises, enabling them to go out of the chaotic state, to evolve toward the orderly direction, to keep breaking through the "upper limit of growth", and to eventually enable construction enterprises to realize sustainable and healthy growth through the identification, absorption and allocation of resources.Fundamentally, the forming of the growth ability of construction enterprises is a process of integrating knowledge into various workflows through learning. Therefore, cultivating the marketing ability, the organizational management ability, and the technology innovation ability, as well as creating the networking & cooperation relations are the effective ways to build the growth ability of construction enterprises. Chapter Five of the article suggests that the evolution of growth ability, if it's the ability upgrade on the same basis, can be realized just by continuous improving along the original growth route with suitable disturbance of external force; and if it's changing from a current growth ability to another growth ability, can only be realized if major adjustment is made to the four sub-abilities, and merging, restructuring and integration are the effective ways to realize the improvement and upgrade of the growth ability of construction enterprises.In order for construction enterprises to have an objective understanding of their growth ability, the article has designed a series of evaluation indexes for the growth ability of construction enterprises using the evaluation method of the mutation theory, and has also analyzed and tested the growth ability evaluation system as well as the effective ways to realize the improvement and upgrade of the growth ability with the CH and RB companies as examples.