Entrepreneur Social Capital, Knowledge Acquisition, and Start-Up Firm Performance

Abstract

Entrepreneurial social capital is founded on the basis of the environmental trust. It takes advantage of a series of social network resources which are built by a network of relationships and coordinate abilities, so as to realize knowledge acquisition which will promote network capacity of firm performance. In the transition process of Chinese economy, the social capital of entrepreneurs themselves have practical significance on newly-established firms which need to break through the resource constraint and realize rapid growth. The research theory has enriched the theoretical connotation of entrepreneurs' social capital. It is divided into three dimensionalities; they are environmental trust, network relation, and network capacity, and then building a good model about entrepreneurial social capital, knowledge acquisition, and start-up firm performance. According to the empirical analysis of the newly established 564 companies in Yangtze delta area, the research results show that environmental trust has positive effect on the construction of network relationship and network capacity. While the knowledge acquisition was significantly and positively correlated with the start-up firm performance, it also indicates that the relation between the environmental trust and the start-up firm performance is an inverse U shape. However, the knowledge acquisition of enterprises will promote the relationship between entrepreneurial social capital and enterprise performance, as well as announcing that only having strong entrepreneurial social capitals can get the needed knowledge. Furthermore, one needs to translate knowledge into the internal ability of enterprise. Consequently, one can get a competitive advantage. This chapter explores all of this.