The Mechanism of Sustained Immigrant Entrepreneurship: Wenzhounese Immigrants in Italy

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the core mechanism of overseas immigrants’ sustained entrepreneurship. It also analyzes how the immigrant entrepreneurs fit within the Italian culture to thereby improve their ambidextrous innovation ability and innovation performance. This chapter presents four case studies on immigrant entrepreneurs, and explores the embedding strategies in different developmental stages of entrepreneurship. The Wenzhounese immigrants who establish firms are able to develop a dynamic relationship with the Italian culture, overcoming liabilities of foreignness and liabilities of outsidership. The embedded culture plays different roles in motivating innovation at different stages of entrepreneurship. The connections between the immigrants’ cluster network and their embedded culture in the regional economy evolves as the stages of entrepreneurship change. This study reveals a number of key findings that are explainable through social network theory and innovation theory. The findings offer critical insights into the study of the sustained entrepreneurship of migrants in their host countries.