Research On The Relationship Between Resource Acquisition And Entrepreneurial Performance: Based On The View Of Capability

With the development of world economic and technologies and the uncertainty of the market, it is a great challenge for firms to get sustainable competitive advantage. According to the researches in the fields of entrepreneurship, strategic management and knowledge management, some scholars believes that resource is the source of competitive advantage. When facing fast changing environment, single firm has difficulty in grasping new knowledge and technologies, so firms should exert second entrepreneurship and learn from outer sources to acquire information and resources and digest them to form special knowledge for the competitive advantage. Therefore, firm capability is becoming a crucial factor for competitive advantage. But, learning is difficult to exert for firms, then network can solve this problem to help firms get higher performance.Honesty is a informal mechanism in Chinese market and Guanxi in Chinese culture is a factor that affects resource acquisition. In the process of entrepreneurship, it is crucial for firms to get resources via network, which can be regarded as a way of getting resources. This means that firms should improve the network capability and allocate all resources acquired. Then firms should reform their mechanism of resource allocation to solve short term behaviors and think more about the long term operation. What's more, firms should improve entrepreneurial capability and education level to facilitate the entrepreneurs to invest social capital to enhance the performance. On the other hand, firms should allocate resources and leverage them to reallocate the network, which is an indicator for entrepreneurial capability. All of these measures can reinforce the comprehensive competence.Based on the theories of resource-based view, competence, social network and organizational learning, this paper studies the effect of network capability, entrepreneurial capability and resource acquisition on the performance according to the main clue-resource acquisition posture. This paper puts network capability, entrepreneurial capability and resource acquisition and the performance into one integrated framework. After defining all variables, this paper constructs a conceptual model and put forward 21 hypotheses and use software to test then empirically based on the data from three provinces in northeast of China.Finally this paper gets the following conclusions:(1) Network capability and firm performance. Network capability is positively related with the performance. Three sub-conclusions are as follows: firstly, network visioning capability is positively related to the performance. As the main factor of network capability, network visioning capability is important to the performance. This capability can cause firms to think about the importance of network strategically, then to take part in the network. This capability can make the firm know the network situation and network partners before it enters this network, and more importantly, this capability can make the firm know the direction and goals of the network development, which can help the firm to get clear strategies to cooperate with the partners to improve the performance. Secondly, relation portfolio capability has positive relationship with the performance, that is, better relation portfolio capability can bring better performance. For new ventures, it is hard to organize the relationships, but once the firms can deal with these relationships well, good performance will arise. Finally, position management capability is positively related to the performance. When firms can position itself in the network correctly and use the position to improve the network capability, the performance will be better. Besides, this paper finds that network visioning capability affects relation portfolio and position management capabilities positively.(2) Entrepreneurial capability and the performance. One conclusion of the paper is that opportunity capability has no effect on the performance but operation management capability has positive effect on the performance. Because of the special features of opportunity, the formation and usage of this capability is useful for firm to discover new opportunity and use it to satisfy the inner requirements, but whether this opportunity can help firm to develop new products and these products can satisfy the market needs testing, besides, the performance can lag behind the time. So, opportunity capability can exert no effect on the performance sometimes. But for the operation management capability, if firms own strong competence to operate and manage resources, then they can combine all resources to satisfy market require. This combination of inner and outer operations can improve the operation management capability, which, in turn, can enhance the performance.(3) Network capability and resource acquisition. The three dimensions of network capability have positive relationships with resource acquisition efficacy and outcome. Network visioning capability can make firm to study its development strategically then firm can get resources and allocate them to insure their efficacy and outcome. Relation portfolio capability can enrich the scales and size of the network and improve the quality of these ties to make sure the firm can get high-quality resources. Position management capability can make firm to acquire resources according to its position in the network, which takes the exact condition into consideration and makes firms to use network to get resources easily.(4) Entrepreneurial capability and resource acquisition. Opportunity competence has no effects on the resource acquisition efficacy and outcome. Although this capability can enhance the market development and new product development, it is necessary to get some paths from this capability to resource acquisition. Operation management capability is positively related to resource acquisition efficacy and outcome. The operation of the firm needs many kinds of resources, so firms must get key resources to satisfy the routine work. This capability can improve the need of the resources, which can make the firm choose better resources.(5) Resource acquisition and the performance. Resource acquisition efficacy has positive effect on the performance. The higher the efficacy, the better the performance. Better resources can facilitate the development of the firm. Resource acquisition outcome has no effect on the performance. Firms can acquire some resources, but if they don't pay attention to the usage and availability of these resources, the efficacy of the resources can not be exerted well, which can result in bad performance. Only by enriching the potential of these resources and allocating them can they exert best use to build competitive advantage, then to improve the performance.The contributions of the papers are as follows: (1) based on resource-based view, competence, and process, this paper builds a conceptual model to study the relationships among capability, resource acquisition and the performance and use data from the northeast of china to test them empirically. According to the dimensions of network capability from the work of Xu et. al, this papers tests the relations among the dimensions and resource acquisition efficacy and outcome and the performance. This is a new try and can supplement the strategies for the take-off of the Old Industry Base of Northeast of China. (2) This paper divides resource acquisition into two dimensions: efficacy and outcome according to the posture, not the behavior, and study their relation with the performance. (3) This paper regards capability as the antecedent of resource acquisition posture. Entrepreneurial capability and network capability are dynamic. Studying resource acquisition posture from the view of dynamism has great significance.Meanwhile, there are some limitations: (1) the paper uses data form the northeast of china to get the results. Whether the results can apply to other regions needs more tests. (2) There is urgent need to test the hypotheses untested further. Due to the samples limitation, this paper explains the results and reason why some hypotheses fail to be supported, but it is still not enough. More empirical studies are needed in the future. (3) The mechanism of the capability and their relations needs more studies. The bridge between capabilities can have effects on the performance, which should be a focus of the future research.In all, there is further need to test the relations among capability, resource acquisition and the performance. All of them should go with the time, and then firm can survive and develop for a long time.