Research On The Impacts Of External Environment On The Formation Of Technological Cluster

As the driver of regional development, clusters has attracted more and more interest from the government, the enterprises and academic researchers in our country.The whole country and relative departments have taken the development of clusters into the strategy of the regional development. Today science and technology are the primary productive force, developing high-tech industry plays a very important role in Promoting technological progress and economic development. The agglomeration of the high-tech enterprises provides a powerful support to the establishment of sustainable competitive advantage of industry. Meantime, active entrepreneurial activities are great force of economic development. As a result, entrepreneurial activities especially the agglomeration of high-tech entrepreneurial activities and also the formation of the technological entrepreneurial clusters need to be studied not only from the theoretical aspect but also practical aspect.From the time when Marshall explained the formation of industrial districts by external economics, scholars forthcoming have studied clusters from different perspectives. However, they didn't paid enough attention to the early process of the formation of clusters, either the formation of the technological entrepreneurial clusters. It's essential to promote technology and economy by the high efficiency of technological entrepreneurial clusters in the developing countries especially in China.This paper studies dynamically the formation of technological entrepreneurial clusters from the perspective of enterprise ecology. Many scholars did lots of theoretical and empirical researches in different aspects, such as Economics, Sociology, Management, Economic Geography and so on. These researches have some limitations in explaining the growing of the clusters. As a scientific subject, Ecology is to study the growing of biological community, so based on the researching the domestic and international relevant documents, this paper studies the stages of the formation of clusters, the external environment that the clusters depend on, and also the different affects of environment on different stages by using ecological way of thinking, theory and methods, jumping from the range of the analytic framework of Economics, Sociology, Management, Economic Geography.Enterprise Ecology is scientific subject which takes enterprises as organisms, and studies the relationship among enterprises and between enterprise and external environment. The growing of enterprise cluster is the basic research content of Enterprise Ecology. To explain the formation of clusters using the theory of Enterprise Ecology, taking enterprises as organisms and highlighting the living characteristics of clusters can help study cluster more systemically and specifically. The formation of cluster goes though emerging stage, enterprise-race stage, enterprise colony stage and enterprise cluster stage. At the emerging stage, enterprises appear scatteredly because of the change of policy, technology or market. There are almost no connections among these enterprises. At the enterprise-race stage, enterprises come and are set up because of the leading and model role of the first-set-up enterprises. The clustering effect has come into being. This stage is the prime development period of leading industry. Promoted by the leading industry, the related industry including related enterprises and also some supporting agencies appear and develop. Then the enterprise colony stage is coming. At this stage, structure of the community is basically complete, but it is not enough to call it a cluster. Enterprise cluster emphasize that the cluster is organic whole formed by the systemic connection of enterprises and agencies rather than a mess of so many organizations. Cluster can also reveal how the related enterprises agglomerate together and gain competitive advantage. It need some time to evolve from enterprise colony stage to enterprise cluster stage, and not all the enterprise colony can get to the stage of enterprise cluster.Cluster can't develop without the external environment. The enterprises need the resources supplied by the environment. Specifically speaking, based on the research literatures considering the requirement of resources of the entrepreneurial enterprises the external environment must be equipped with two conditions: the environment can supply these resources; the environment can make sure the resources to be accessed by the enterprises smoothly. As a result, this paper classifies the external environment into two types. One type shows the environment factors which can supply the resources that the entrepreneurial enterprises, including technology, capital, human resource environment factor. The other type shows the environment factors that help and make sure the enterprise have access to the resources and get them, including market, policies and regulations, Intermediary Service System, information and entrepreneurial culture environment factors. The eight environment factors constitute the external environment system.The external environment has three basic characteristics:munificence, complexity and dynamism. Munificence can influence the number of the enterprises in the cluster, the structure and directly of cluster directly. Complexity and dynamism, together to be called the uncertainty of environment, creat conditions for the organizations to cluster. At the four different stages, eight environment factors play different roles. At emerging stage, technology, capital, human resource, market, policies and regulations, and entrepreneurial culture environment factors are important. At enterprise race stage, technology, capital, human resource, market, Intermediary Service System and information environment factors are important. At Enterprises colony stage, technology, capital, human resource, market, Intermediary Service System and information environment factors are important. At enterprise cluster stage, technology, capital, human resource, market, Intermediary Service System, information and entrepreneurial culture environment factors are important.Theoretical model and hypotheses this paper puts forward are tested using SPSS software. The data are from questionnaire of 89 software enterprises within ChangChun Software Park. This paper only tests H2 because of the judgement that ChangChun Software Park is in the period of enterprise-race stage. Results of the test show that H2 is supported. A discussion is made on the test results, which further makes it clear that out research is of great importance both in theory and practice. This paper analyses the significance of hypotheses which are supported and analyses the cause of hypotheses which are not supported according to the special development background of ChangChun Software Park.