Entrepreneurship And Entrepreneurial Environment

Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial capital are significant marks of era of knowledge economy. Innovation mainly comes from knowledge, creativity, some new ideas and perspectives. And these new ideas through entrepreneurship could be used better, and ultimately promote economic development and employment growth. Recently, China has made a decision to construct an innovation-oriented country; such an environment can play an active role in entrepreneurial development and make entrepreneurship contribute more to our country.Therefore, the knowledge-based economy should be put more emphasis on entrepreneurship which can conduct and facilitate knowledge-spillover. That is, we should value entrepreneurship activity. Thus we can make full use of knowledge–spillovers, achieve its economic value and finally promote the development of economy and the whole society.The most contemporary definition of entrepreneurship is made by David B. Audretsch,Zoltan J. Acs,et al. (2001,2006), entrepreneurship is one of the effective mechanisms, channels or"catheters", which can convert general knowledge into economically useful knowledge and finally into economic activity. This essay describes four characteristics of entrepreneurship, i.e. regional activity, new business creation, innovation and change. The creation of a new enterprise is a common form but not the nature of entrepreneurship. Innovation is the essence of entrepreneurship. Besides, we talk about the process, the types and indicators of entrepreneurship.Through the study of western scholars′essays, we can see the study of entrepreneurship environment is a new stage of entrepreneurial study. Even now the latest study of entrepreneurial opportunity, in a certain sense, is actually a kind of environmental study. In particular, the GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 2008) links entrepreneurship, institution and economic development. There are two distinctive features in the 2008 report, i.e. talking about the relationship between institution and entrepreneurship and economic development; adding two topics about entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial training. Through both of the features we can see that the research about entrepreneurship recently is more about the environmental studies, such as the institutional and cultural environment of entrepreneurship.Based on a large number of reading and review of westerners′literatures, this essay studies the problems and causes of these problems about the entrepreneurial environment in China and proposes several policies to optimize our entrepreneurial environment.Firstly, I think that entrepreneurial environment is a combination of factors which can impact entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial development. There are four characteristics of entrepreneurial environment, i.e. regional, external, complex, variable and uncertain.The essay builds a model about the relationship between entrepreneurial environment and entrepreneurship by linking several factors. Inspired by westerners, we figure that the generalized entrepreneurial capital equals to entrepreneurial environment. Adopting the views of David B. Audretsch et al., We think that entrepreneurial opportunity is not exogenous but endogenous through Research and Development (R&D). So we put entrepreneurial opportunity into the scope of environment. We analyze the relationship between entrepreneurial environment and entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial opportunity and entrepreneurship; between entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial opportunity; between entrepreneurial capital and economic development. Secondly, after learning of the state of our entrepreneurial environment, we find that there are still many shortcomings of our entrepreneurial environment to be further improved, although entrepreneurship in China has got a large degree of development and the overall environment is getting better and better. In this paper, we adopt both empirical analysis and positive analysis to study the problems and analyze the reasons for these problems.On the one hand, through the empirical analysis in this essay, we analyze the problems and causes of these problems from different perspectives. The problems are: the effective use of entrepreneurial opportunities yet to be improved; the overall motivation for entrepreneurship not strong enough; lack for entrepreneurial capacity a lot. Besides, financial support is a bottleneck factor; business and professional services still lag behind; we still lack for entrepreneurial education and training. In addition, from the comparisons of entrepreneurial environment in different parts, we can find that the biggest problem is significant differences, i.e. there are large differences among three kinds of regions and between city and country.On the other hand, through the positive analysis in this paper, we attempts to construct a dynamic time-series model to try studying the marketing environment, innovation environment, business environment and institutional environment using this panel data model. By using the method of first-differenced GMM, we estimate the data from 30 provinces and municipalities, excluding Tibet, in 1999-2007, in China. Besides, based on the estimations of the coefficients of each variable, we analyze the impact of various factors on entrepreneurship.The results of the positive analysis are as follows:(1) In the more developed areas, entrepreneurship is better carried out, start-ups more, and a higher successful rate of new enterprises. The entrepreneurial impact of business has been fully brought out in these areas; while this effect has not yet fully realized in the less developed regions. (2) Although innovation is one of the key factors to entrepreneurship, innovation in China has not performed strong regional characteristics.(3) The marketing environment and business environment have shown a strong regional characteristic. Addition, the marketing environment in China is better than the business environment, and the business environment in China is slightly worse.(4) Provinces and municipalities have paid special attention on entrepreneurial policy. Entrepreneurial policy and institutional environment have a greater influence on entrepreneurship in China.Finally, this essay proposes some suggestions to optimize our entrepreneurial environment.In the first place, strengthen financial intermediation and optimize business financial environment. From the measures adopted, we can see that there are mainly two aspects for the optimization of financial environment. On the one hand, increase the supply of venture capital, such as increasing access to finance, expanding the scale of venture capital, establishing Venture Capital Guide Funds, giving more micro-guaranteed credit; relieving business registration fees, and so on. These measures increase the supply of venture capital directly or indirectly. On the other hand, strengthen the social credit environment and the construction of various service systems. These methods can benefit for solving venture capital issues through the optimization of other environments. If the venture capital issues have been solved well, and the financial environment improved, the entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs′motivation will be enhanced and entrepreneurial behavior will increase.In the second place, improve service quality and increase the"short-legged"environment of whole business.In the third place, enhance entrepreneurship and improve the culture of entrepreneurial environment. Improving the environment, society should create an environment more tolerant of failure; increase the cultural environment in more entrepreneurial bases, entrepreneurship and innovation centers; increase the building of colleges and universities; make full use of these resources to serve the areas around them.At last, eliminate institutional obstacles, create an appropriate institutional environment for entrepreneurship and develop more effective entrepreneurship policies.