| Unicorn firms("unicorns" for short)are private startups that have received private equity investment but have not yet gone public,with a market valuation of more than $1billion.The expansion of production boundaries,the enhancement of economic resilience,the enhancement of innovation empowerment,and the highly market-driven entrepreneurial model possessed by unicorns are showing emerging vitality and becoming an important reference indicator for evaluating the growth potential of the World New Economy.According to the 2021 Global Unicorn List,there are more than 1,000 unicorns in the world,with a total valuation of more than $3 trillion.Unicorns such as Uber,Airbnb,and Byte Dance are constantly exploring the blue ocean market by using new business platform models and advanced technological innovations,and leveraging a new business ecosystem of energy saving,sharing and mutual benefit.However,the growth path of unicorns is also full of huge uncertainties.They are constantly exposed to competitive pressure from old and new forces,the risk of turnover of entrepreneurial teams,and the influence of various external factors such as regulatory policies,business environment and emergencies.Currently,the academical community is not clear about the key entrepreneurial ecological elements that affect the growth of unicorns.Meanwhile,the mechanisms and key models of how unicorns rely on key elements to achieve value growth are still unclear.In addition,given that unicorns are non-listed companies,and their publicly disclosed data are few and scattered,it is difficult to carry out empirical research.Therefore,current literature mainly focuses on qualitative comparison and induction of typical cases rather than generalizing the action rule and management mechanism of universality.In view of the above research gaps,this thesis uses multi-source public data screening to obtain matching data set of city policies,venture capital institutions and unicorn entrepreneurship and create a Chinese Unicorns Research Database.Then,this thesis analyzes and empirically studies the internal mechanism of the growth of Chinese unicorns from the perspective of entrepreneurial ecosystem.Based on a series of quantitative research methods such as topic modeling,policy quantification,econometric model and configuration modeling,this thesis identifies the key factors that affect the growth of Chinese unicorns,empirically studies the impact of policy support,venture capital boost and organizational entrepreneurship on the growth of Chinese unicorns,and discovers multiple patterns of high valuation growth of Chinese unicorns.Specifically,the following four research works have been carried out:The first research is proposing and demonstrating the three key entrepreneurial ecological elements of unicorns.Based on the entrepreneurial ecosystem theory,it is proposed that the core structure of the unicorn entrepreneurial ecosystem can be explained by three dimensions: institution,relationship and structure.Then,using a 700,000-word data set of advisory reports and news texts and the LDA topic model,we extract 8 key elements of unicorn growth from the perspective of the public and government departments.With the help of the above top-down theoretical deconstruction and bottomup practical induction,it is proposed that policy support,venture capital boost and organizational entrepreneurship are the key mechanisms for the growth of unicorns with high valuations.Based on this,the following three empirical research contents are designed.The second research quantifies the key characteristics and functions of unicorn support policies.Based on the theory of policy instruments,this study designs a unicorn policy coding system,quantifies 287 unicorn support policy documents from 25 cities since 2015,and identifies the tendencies and regional differences of support policy instruments.Specifically,it shows that local governments “attach more importance to supply and environmental policy instruments than to demand policy instruments",and the density of policy instruments is characterized by "gradient decline of environment,supply and demand".Hangzhou,Chengdu,Qingdao and Jinan are among the top four cities in the country.The intensity of policy instruments has a constraint structure on density,and Beijing and Shanghai have balanced the density and intensity of policy instruments.This empirical research also analyzes the effects of two key features,the density and intensity of policy instruments,on unicorn cultivation.This study finds that the density of policy instruments and the number of unicorns cultivated have an inverted "U" shape,and the relationship between intensity and the number of unicorns increased exponentially.The third research empirically tests the boosting mechanism of venture capital on the growth of unicorns.According to the unicorn financing data and the corresponding institutional investment data from 2017 to 2020,the social network analysis method is used to identify the investment portfolio network attributes of unicorns embedded in venture capital institutions.The Heckman two-stage econometric model is used to empirically test the boosting effect of venture capital on the growth performance of unicorns.The main results are as follows:(1)Structural and relational embeddings have significant direct effects on unicorn growth performance.(2)The study confirms that the moderating effect of portfolio diversity of venture capital institutions only occurs in the impact of relationship strength on unicorn valuation.That is,under the basic premise that venture capital institutions pursue diversity and avoid investment risks,if unicorns can be recognized by the leading investment institutions,the valuation will be significantly improved.The last research structurally outlines three types of configuration models for the growth of unicorn startups with high valuations.Looking at the relationship between policy support,venture capital boost and organizational entrepreneurship from the perspective of the ecological system,three key growth modes of high valuation of unicorns are extracted from 58 typical unicorns’ cases by using fs QCA method,which are the multi-star flow diversion model,the capital-enabled scientific innovation model,and the policy-assisted exploration model.The study find that each configuration has the "helping hand" of the government,while the hand of venture capital has a double-edged sword effect,which depends on the ability of the unicorn entrepreneurial team and the choice of entrepreneurial mode.This thesis attempts to demystify the growth of unicorns in China,and provides new theoretical insights and empirical evidence for understanding why unicorns can obtain high growth opportunities.The research contributions are as follows:First,this thesis systematically quantifies the unicorn support policies at the city level in China by using policy instruments,and analyzes the effects of two key characteristics of the density and intensity of policy instruments on the cultivation of unicorns for the first time,which provides a quantitative benchmark for evaluating the efficiency and adjustment direction of the unicorn policy tools used by local governments.Second,this thesis explores the impact mechanism of venture capital on the growth of unicorns from the perspective of network embedding,expands the previous focus on resource acquisition of startup companies,verifies the direct effect and boundary effect of venture capital from the perspective of inter-enterprise investment portfolios,and provides a new theoretical explanation for how unicorns effectively use multiple rounds of venture capital to promote growth.Third,this thesis applies the entrepreneurial ecosystem theory to the unicorn growth scene,opens the "black box" of the unicorn growth mechanism,and reveals the unique growth mechanism of Chinese unicorns,which is different from the United States and Western Europe’s growth mechanism that focuses on "capital entrepreneurship",making up for the deficiency of existing studies on the growing entrepreneurial ecology.The "excellence but not excessive" of institutional support,the "network relationship" of venture capital involvement,and the "innovative model orientation" of entrepreneurial teams all reveal the unique mechanism of the growth of Chinese unicorns,which will help promote the theoretical research and practice guidance of Chinese-style entrepreneurship. |
PDF Full Text Request