Research On Competence Of Grasping Entrepreneurial Opportunities Based On Social Capital

Entrepreneurship is a kind of network process, and during the process, various kinds of collaborations such as strategic alliance play a critical role. Entrepreneur should build up a wide, smooth and intimate social network to get the first information and resources in his grasping the opportunity. Social capital is recognized as a critical material in the network economy. Only the one who's bound in strong relationships and network ties among the members can discover, evaluate and exploit the emerging entrepreneurial opportunities more efficiently and effectively. The purpose of this study is to investigate how an entrepreneur's social capital affects his capability in grasping the entrepreneurial opportunities.Nahapiet&Ghoshal(1998) divides social capital into three dimensions: structural dimension, relational dimension, cognitive dimension. Moreover, since an entrepreneur's experiential learning capacity of new knowledge and past related knowledge base also influence the effectiveness of his grasping the entrepreneurial opportunity. Experiential learning ability and current knowledge base of an entrepreneur are also used as two variables in the research model to increase the integrity of the model.An empirical survey methodology is applied to test the research model and hypotheses proposed in the study. Four out of nine hypotheses are validated in our research model with Path Analysis.