Study On College Start-up’s Entrepreneurial Learning, Self-efficacy And Entreprenurial Orientation

In the background of advocating of public entrepreneurship by China central government, college start-ups with higher talents are great potential entrepreneurship group, whose entrepreneurship activities are beneficial for emerging industries, regional development and economic transformation and upgrading. However, the overall entrepreneurship rate of Chinese college students and relevant successes rate is significantly lower than western countries. And there are still many factors that constraining entrepreneurship penitential of college start-ups. The paper attempted to explore topics about entrepreneurship learning, entrepreneurship self-efficiency and entrepreneurship orientation.The paper mainly includes three sections. The first section is study on entrepreneurial learning and self-efficacy of college start-ups. According to main sources of college students in acquiring entrepreneurial learning, the paper distinguished three modes of entrepreneurial learning: family internal learning, social network learning and entrepreneurial education. The section discussed the influences of the three learning modes on their entrepreneurship self-efficacy and relevant moderators. The second section is study on entrepreneurial orientation of college start-ups. By integrating perspectives of upper echelons theory, the paper suggested that entrepreneurial self-efficacy would influence entrepreneurial orientation of college students’ start-up companies. The paper theoretically explored the influence mechanism and also provides empirical evidences that entrepreneurship self-efficacy is positively relevant with all dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation, including innovativeness, risk-taking and proactiveness. Furthermore, entrepreneurship self-efficacy is mediating the effects of entrepreneurship learning on entrepreneurship orientation. The third section is study on performance effects of entrepreneurship orientation of college start-ups. The section studies the effect of entrepreneurship orientation on performance of college star-up companies. The paper suggests that there is an inverted U curve relationship between entrepreneurship orientation and performance.The three sections are relatively independent, and all including theoretical hyphosis, empirical study design, validity and reliability, empirical results. And the paper surveyed a group of college start-ups engaging in entrepreneurship activities when still in college or within 3 years after graduation. Based on theoretical study and empirical evidences, the paper found all the three modes of entrepreneurial learning are able to improve self-efficacy of college start-ups. And a serial of factors, such as family background, gender, major relevance and previous work experience, would be able to moderating the effects of entrepreneurship learning. The empirical evidences suggested that the learning effects of college start-ups are mainly happened in the psychological level. The entrepreneurship learning improves self-efficacy and further exerts influence on strategic preferences in the psychological level. And the empirical evidences supported the above theatrical viewpoints: there is an inverted U curve relationship between entrepreneurship orientation and performance. And in the group with higher self-efficacy, the inverted U curve is more significant. There exists prosibility that too high entrepreneurial self-efficacy will lead to "overconfidence" trap.Finally, the paper gives some suggestion about how to improve entrepreneurship leaning system and how to adjust policy system to effectively support entrepreneuship activities of college students.