Entrepreneurial network pathways to venture growth: An FSQCA analysis
点击次数：
论文类型：会议论文
发表时间：2019-09-19
收录刊物：EI
卷号：1
页面范围：392-400
摘要：New ventures are usually under pressure to overcome liabilities of newness and smallness. They must focus on assembling resources to survive and grow. The literature suggests that start-ups acquire or accumulate resources to utilize them building a resource base through entrepreneurial network. Yet extant literature emphasizes direct effect and causality between entrepreneurial network and firm performance, and most prior research on entrepreneurial network aggregates its features into a gestalt construct to investigate its influence on venture growth. Drawing on the resource management theory and entrepreneurial capability (EC) theories, this study investigate the multiply pathways of intricate antecedent conditions. This study deconstructs entrepreneurial network into network size and network diversity dimensions, and analyses resource orchestration sub-processes such as resource structuring, transforming and harmonizing. In terms of entrepreneurial capability, opportunity sensing capability and opportunity achieving capability are utilized as EC measure. This study focuses on technological start-ups in China. The case companies are sampled deliberately from representative industrial agglomeration areas in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Liaoning Province. The causal mechanisms are explored emphatically by which those factors mentioned ahead collectively affect venture growth. To realize that, the study utilizes fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), a new analytic technique that uses Boolean algebra to provide a holistic view of interrelationships, compared to traditional net effect approaches that assume symmetric and linear relationships among variables. By analyzing the derived complex solutions that illustrate the causal recipes and calculating the consistency scores for all possible complex causal combinations, solutions and pathways for high membership score in the outcome conditions are given and discussed. The results show that (i) entrepreneurial network attributes lay the foundation for different types of resource orchestration actions; (ii) different combinations of resource orchestration affect the formations of entrepreneurial capability and (iii) multiple pathways of complex causal configurations can lead to certain increase of venture growth. This study provides critical conclusions and insightful implications for researchers and entrepreneurs. ? Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, ECIE 2019. All rights reserved.