The Effect Of Entrepreneurial Resource And Entrepreneurial Strategy On Entrepreneurial Performance

In the era of knowledge economy with booming technology, increasingly complex environment and fierce competition, it becomes more difficult to conduct entrepreneurship because of curtailed product life cycle, imitation of advantages and diversified market demand, which also makes the exploitation and combination of entrepreneurial resources and the establishment of corresponding strategy more complex. It is no doubt a big challenge for entrepreneurship. Therefore, as for the entrepreneurship firm embedded in the entrepreneurial networks, what resources should acquire and combine and how to establish corresponding strategy in order to enhance entrepreneurial performance indeed need deliberate consideration. Based on these questions, this paper conducts subsequent research.We first divide the question into three sub-questions, namely how entrepreneurial resources directly and indirectly influence entrepreneurial performance, how entrepreneurial resources influence entrepreneurial performance under different environment and organizational structure context, and how entrepreneurship firms dynamically match the entrepreneurial resources and strategy to enhance entrepreneurial performance. And then we review relative theoretical research, formulate the research hypothesises and establish the research framework. At last, we conduct statistical research and typical case study to test the three questions above. Through the analysis, we come to several main conclusions.Firstly, entrepreneurial resources have a positive effect on entrepreneurial performance which supports the preceding research result. Based on the research content and goal, we divide the entrepreneurial resources into financial resources, human resources, management resources, information resources, technological resources, policy resources, and find that theses resources all have directly effect on entrepreneurial performance which reflects that the more financial resources, human resources, management resources, information resources, technological resources and policy resources firms owns, the better entrepreneurial performance firms will have. We also rank the importance of the resources and the conclusion shows that human resources is the most important above, financial resources take second place, followed by information resources, technological resources and policy resources, management resources. It is noteworthy that management resources play the least important role, but the positive and significant effect should not be neglected. Secondly, the effect of entrepreneurial resources on entrepreneurial strategy and effect of entrepreneurial strategy on entrepreneurial performance are both confirmed, and the entrepreneurial strategy plays a mediating role. In order to fully explore the role of entrepreneurial strategy, we divide the entrepreneurial strategy into cost leadership strategy and differentiation strategy. The result shows that entrepreneurial resources have a positive effect on entrepreneurial strategy, among that financial resources, human resources and information resources are conducive to both cost leadership strategy and differentiation strategy, management resources is conducive to cost leadership strategy. The result also shows that both cost leadership strategy and differentiation strategy have a positive effect on entrepreneurial performance and compared to cost leadership strategy, the differentiation strategy plays a greater role. At the same time, we can conclude from the direct effect of entrepreneurial resources on entrepreneurial strategy, effect of entrepreneurial strategy on entrepreneurial performance and effect of entrepreneurial resources on entrepreneurial performance that entrepreneurial resources have a limited direct effect on entrepreneurial performance and the mediating effect is more significant.Thirdly, environmental dynamism and organization structure organism play a moderating effect on the influence of entrepreneurial resources on entrepreneurial performance. The result shows that environmental dynamism and organization structure organism are not influencing factors of entrepreneurial performance, but moderating factors. As for environmental dynamism, it plays a negative effect on the influence of financial resources, human resources, management resources and policy resources on entrepreneurial performance and plays a positive effect on the influence of information resources, technological resources on entrepreneurial performance, which means that the dynamic change of environment makes the market and technology information more important, accelerates the spread and diffusion of new technology and knowledge, and also improve the chance of new product development and innovation and finally increases the influence of entrepreneurial resources on entrepreneurial performance. As for organization structure organism, it plays a positive effect on the influence of financial resources, human resources, management resources, information resources, technological resources on entrepreneurial performance and plays a nonsignificant effect on the influence of policy resources on entrepreneurial performance, which means that the flexible organization structure can facilitate the acquisition, integration and exploitation of the above resources and finally increases the influence of entrepreneurial resources on entrepreneurial performance. Because policy resources is a kind of macro-level uncontrollable factor which can’t change with the organization structure, so organization structure organism doesn’t play a moderating effect between policy resources and performance.At last, the index of firm age and firm size don’t have a significant positive effect on entrepreneurial performance which contradicts with a lot of extant researches. Extant researches on entrepreneurial management and entrepreneurial performance show that with the growing of firm age and size, it can play a positive role in enhancing the performance of entrepreneurial firms, especially high-tech entrepreneurial firms. In view of this, we think the reason is that firm age and firm size are not controllable in short periods and firms are difficult to change them quick enough to enhance performance. Through the descriptive analysis, we can see that analyzed firms are mainly high-tech private firms which are young and small, so the age and size don’t play a positive role.The results we put forward above not only fill in the gap in entrepreneurship research field, but also direct the entrepreneurship practice. Although we have conducted rich research in this field, there are still a lot research questions to explore.