A Review of the Research on Hidden Champion Entrepreneurship and Prospects

Abstract

Simon’s “Hidden Champion”, a leader in the international market with high export performance, is a successful model in the field of small and medium-sized enterprises. The mechanism of Hidden Champion’s success deserves much academic attention, but scholars pay more attention just on the success factors of Hidden Champion, and put forward factors as globalization, customer orientation, innovation, competitive advantage, employee loyalty, strong leadership, decentralized organization and corporate culture, and institutional environment, while few scholars have studied the growth process and mechanism of Hidden Champion. Existing researches show that the growth process of Hidden Champion has typical characteristics of entrepreneurial enterprises, which are highlighted in their sensitivity to environmental change, risk bearing, initiativeness and innovation. Hidden Champion mainly focuses on a certain market segment, creatively integrates resources, constantly develops new market opportunities, and improves market share, so as to achieve sustainable development. Therefore, it is of great significance to systematically study the growth process and mechanism of Hidden Champion and summarize its development rules and models for the management strategy research from the entrepreneurial perspective. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the research status of Hidden Champion from the entrepreneurial perspective and provide reference for future research on Hidden Champion entrepreneurship. By conducting a review of Hidden Champion on the entrepreneurial perspective, we put forward the concept of Hidden Champion entrepreneurship, sum up the dependent variable of Hidden Champion entrepreneurship, construct the opportunity-resource integration process of Hidden Champion entrepreneurship, and finally build up the research integration model of Hidden Champion entrepreneurship. The result reveals that the dependent variables of Hidden Champion entrepreneurship mainly include market orientation, technology orientation, entrepreneurship orientation, network relationship, human capital, entrepreneurial leadership and environment. From the perspective of opportunity-resource integration, the entrepreneurial process of Hidden Champion is characterized by the double driver of both market and technology, and there are two entrepreneurial processes of opportunity-resource integration driven by market and technology, which complement and balance each other, so as to promote the sustainable competitive advantage of Hidden Champion. We propose future research on the following aspects: (1) Further research on the dependent variables with their connotations, dimensions and measurement scales of Hidden Champion entrepreneurship; (2) Empirical research on the entrepreneurial process of Hidden Champion, especially on the process of opportunity-resource integration of Hidden Champion entrepreneurship; (3) More researches on Hidden Champion entrepreneurship under the Chinese context; (4) More researches on the entrepreneurship strategy of Hidden Champion. This paper proposes to systematically study on the growth process and mechanism of Hidden Champion from the entrepreneurial perspective, and puts forward the concept of Hidden Champion entrepreneurship for the first time. It also constructs the opportunity-resource integration entrepreneurial process model of Hidden Champion driven by both market and technology, which enriches the theoretical research of opportunity-resource integration entrepreneurship. At last, it constructs an integrated model for the further research on Hidden Champion entrepreneurship, and presents new ideas for the strategic research of Hidden Champion.