Research For The Driving Mechanism Of Social Network And Market Information On Strategy Flexibility Of Technology New Ventures

Technology entrepreneurship has played an important role in promoting economic growth, improve industrial upgrading, create jobs and stimulate innovation level; however, new technology start-ups are also facing a high failure rate. As an important driven factor for new venture growth, strategic flexibility is important for technology start-ups to survive and obtain higher performance; strategic flexibility can help Technology new venture acquire legitimacy, access to new resources and gain markets income, and finally, to help start-ups further attract high quality employees, strategic partners and venture capitalists.Currently, research literature on strategic flexibility has made some progress, although there are some scholars make innovative headway on the strategic flexibility’ forming background, theoretical framework, constitute dimension, measurement models and its effects on firm performance, but for their drive mechanism, the existing literatures are less involved. More importantly, existing studies for strategic flexibility are mainly focused on mature companies; little attention has given to the technology start-ups.For those technology start-ups from emerging economies such as China, strategic flexibility as a useful tool to break the core rigidity, to overcome path dependence, and to deal with the dynamic nature of the market, it has become an important means for new technology enterprise to creates competitive advantage under the uncertain environment. Combined with previous field interviews and case studies for nine technology start-ups, this paper construct a process driven model for strategic flexibility based on the dual perspectives of social network theory and market information theory. The thesis explores the following questions:(1) what are the driving effects for different types of social network to strategic flexibility?(2) How market information affect technology new venture’ strategic flexibility from the process view?(3) What are the specific matching mechanism between social network and market information?(4) Whether there exist differences for above matching mechanism between the different types of product market condition? If present, what is the particular manifestation of these differences effects?Using valid questionnaires dataset from227Chinese technology start-ups, the thesis employing multi-group structural equation model to test our research hypotheses. The study found that business networks can promote the strategic flexibility, and compared with the emerging markets, this effect is more significant in the context of a mature product market, while political networks are having a negative impact on the strategic flexibility. when the leading product of technology start-ups is intended for a mature market, the driven effect of market information gathering for strategic flexibility are more significant, while when the leading product is intended for a emerging market, there will be more reasonable for technology start-ups to putting more resource on the marketing information absorption and utilization, since there will be more favorable to enhance strategic flexibility. In addition, for the technology entrepreneurial businesses, the relationship between different types of networks and market information processing behaviors are also exists significant divergence, when its leading products are facing with emerging markets, the political networks will more valuable to its market information gathering, and when its leading products are faced with mature market situation. the business networks will have greater strategic value in the market information acquisition than political network,the research contributions and theoretical innovations of my paper is mainly reflected in the following four areas:(1) First, surpassing the most previous studies which mainly focused on the effects of strategic flexibility on firm performance, this thesis examines the front driven mechanisms of strategic flexibility, and exploratory build a process model, our research findings will help us to rational identify improvement factors for strategic flexibility, thereby to help Chinese technology start-ups increase their performance level through strategic flexibility.(2) Secondly, unlike the mostly past literatures for their structural perspective to study social network from the network centrality, network density, network size and network concentration, the study use relations and functions perspective to characterize the social network, and classify it as business network and political network, and examines the impact of those two different types social network on technology start-ups’strategic flexibility and market information.(3) Thirdly, we find that market information gathering and its utilization are the important ways to enhance strategic flexibility, and there are also exists positive effects in the relationship between information access and information utilization, those finding are also make important contribution for market information theory.(4) Finally, the paper explores the differences effects about above path model between the different product market conditions (emerging markets vs. mature markets) for Chinese new technology ventures, and we found that business and political network, and market information access and their use have different roles to influence strategic flexibility at the above emerging and mature markets, I also examined why those effects will be happen.This thesis is organized as follows:the chapter one discusses the study background, study questions, study methods and study value, and describes the research framework and technical route. Chapter Two are the theoretical foundation and literature review part, I discuss the theoretical context of this study, how to choose literature and make review, I also did an in-depth analysis for relevant theory of technology entrepreneurship, strategic flexibility, market information, and social networks in this chapter. In the Chapter Three, I elaborated the relationship among social network, market information and technology start-ups’strategic flexibility, and developed the corresponding theoretical framework and research hypotheses. The fourth and fifth chapters are research design and empirical results, I describe the method of questionnaire design, data collection procedures, and hypothesis testing results. The last chapter of the thesis did the summary and outlook for my study; I summarized the main conclusions of this paper, analyzed the theoretical contribution and management value, and pointed out the limitations of the study and the future direction of further research.