| Entrepreneurship is widely recognized as the engine of economic growth and social development throughout the world, and entrepreneurship research has been defined and legitimated as a core research field with unique defining questions and theoretical boundaries. In this dissertation that consists of three essays, I strive to provide insights on the knowledge of entrepreneurship at various stages of the start-up process. By doing so, I combined and extend the theories in strategy, entrepreneurship, and cross-culture studies. The overall framework of the dissertation is summarized in Figure 1.;Essay 1 of this thesis starts by asking the question of who will be entrepreneurs and relate this question to the influence of culture. Given the uncertainty and possibility of loss of entrepreneurship, the cultural uncertainty avoidance might exert influence on individual's entrepreneurial opportunity identification and exploration. Therefore, Essay 1 focuses on the direct and indirect effects of cultural uncertainty avoidance on entrepreneurial opportunity identification and exploitation. Inspired by previous research on entrepreneurship and cross-culture studies, I theorize that the cultural uncertainty avoidance will influence individual's attitude towards uncertainty and the social acceptance of entrepreneurial behavior. Also cultural uncertainty avoidance might moderate the relationship between individual's entrepreneurial capability and fear of failure, and their opportunity identification.;Essay 2 focuses on the role of nascent entrepreneur's previous working experience and current legitimation activities on new venture's early stage performance. Following previous research, I divide human capital into experience depth and experience breadth, and predict a inverted-U shaped relationship between experience depth and performance, and a positive relationship between experience breadth and performance. In addition, I focused on two kinds of legitimation actions of nascent entrepreneur, organizing activities and getting external help, and predicted their enhancing role on the relationship between experience and performance. Empirically, I analyzed data of 321 Chinese nascent entrepreneur in their founding process and found support to the predicted role of experience on performance. Moreover, as entrepreneurs are engaging in more organizing activities and receiving more external help, the slops of experience depth to performance will be more abrupt both before and after the optimal level, indicating an enhancing interaction.;Essay 3 relies on institution-based view to examine the role of subnational market-supporting institution on the innovative strategy of emerging market firms. Subnational institution, as the most direct environment of private firms, provide institutional legitimacy and environmental resource, which are necessary for firm innovation. Rarely studied is entrepreneur's active resource-seeking strategy to gain more legitimacy and resource from subnational region. Using survey data on Chinese private firms, I confirmed the facilitation of subnational institution on firm innovation, and found that political capital and business capital can alter the constraints imposed by institution. |
