Does Stage Matter in Chinese New Ventures? The Roles of Learning, Network, and Corporate Entrepreneurship in Building Cultural Competitiveness

Abstract

Survival and growth of new ventures are critical in transition economies because they provide a counterbalance to the loss of jobs in state-owned enterprises and can play a crucial role in stimulating economic growth. More and more researchers have argued that new ventures will play an increasing role in the future global economy, affecting developed and developing economies alike. Not surprisingly, many practitioners and researchers have been led a search for the factors that affect new venture performance (e.g., Baum et al., 2001; Peng and Health, 1996). One of the major research streams in strategic management literature suggests that, for new ventures, the race for survival and growth is very much a race for learning because, given their “liabilities of newness and adolescence” (Stinchcombe, 1965), new ventures need to become efficient in combining and assimilating diverse items of externally sourced “new” knowledge as well as their internal “old” knowledge to align their strengths and weaknesses with the opportunities and threats in the environment (e.g., Kogut and Zander, 1992). The other major research streams in social network literature (Amburgey et al., 1993; Stuart et al., 1999) argue that the survival and growth of new ventures are enhanced by establishing network ties with external stakeholders, thereby overcoming the liability of newness and adolescence by easy access to information, knowledge, and complementary resources (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990) as well as legitimacy (Delmar and Shane, 2004).KeywordsSocial NetworkOrganizational LearningManagement JournalTransition EconomyStrategic Management JournalThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.