Taiwanese Entrepreneurs Research Articles

Navigating Environmental Threats to New Ventures: A Regulatory Fit Approach to Bricolage

AbstractBricolage is a critical strategy used by entrepreneurs to generate resources for new ventures in response to environmental threats that result in resource constraints. However, inconsistent findings exist. Whereas the predominant view in the bricolage literature suggests that resource‐constrained or threatening environments motivate new ventures to bricolage to survive and thrive, some empirical evidence shows that some firms choose not to bricolage in such environments. This paper addresses the inconsistent findings by integrating regulatory fit theory with the bricolage literature, arguing that the effect of environmental threat on bricolage depends on entrepreneurs' dispositional regulatory focus. Data from a time‐lagged survey of 396 Taiwanese entrepreneurs support our hypotheses. Our findings suggest that promotion (prevention) focus disposition is positively (negatively) related to bricolage. More importantly, both promotion and prevention foci weaken the effect of environmental threat on bricolage, serving as boundary conditions for this relationship. Finally, our additional analysis reveals gender differences in bricolage and the contingent effect of promotion focus disposition, enabling us to contribute to regulatory fit theory.

Digital Knowledge and Innovativeness: Catalysts for Digital Entrepreneurship Success in Taiwan's Architecture and Interior Design Industries

This study examines the relationship between digital knowledge, innovativeness, and digital entrepreneurship success among entrepreneurs in Taiwan's architecture and interior design industries. The study’s objectives are to develop a resource-based and dynamic capability theory, assess the effectiveness of digital entrepreneurship, and investigate Taiwanese entrepreneurs in the specified sectors. An online survey was conducted with 218 entrepreneurs of architecture and interior design firms in Taiwan. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis revealed that a focus on digitalization positively influences innovativeness. Furthermore, the study found significant associations between digital capability, digital orientation, digital literacy, and the success of digital entrepreneurs. The findings emphasize the importance of continuous learning and strategic planning in online business entrepreneurship. Theoretical insights from the study contribute to a deeper understanding of innovativeness in the architecture and interior design industries. Future research can explore various forms of innovativeness to support entrepreneurial success. The study concludes with important implications for policy, recommendations for further research, and practical implications for entrepreneurs in the field.

Why Were Innovators Motivated to Be Entrepreneurs? An Empirical Study of Taiwanese Start-Ups

Background: According to the lead user theory, lead users at the front of a market, benefiting significantly from new products, usually have more innovation intension than general users. However, little research depicts the entrepreneurship motivations that drive innovators to become businesspeople. Hence, this study investigates Taiwanese entrepreneurs to fill this gap in the research. Method: This study examines motivations for becoming an entrepreneur from small- and medium-sized enterprises in Taiwan. A multiple regression analysis is used to examine the relationship between lead user inclination and entrepreneurial motivations as well as to test the moderating effect of community involvement. Results: The research results summarise entrepreneurial motivations into five categories: product knowledge advantage, industry expertise, inducements to innovation, career expectations, and benchmarking and indicate the positive moderating effect of community involvement on the association between innovators and entrepreneurs. Conclusions: Additional research is suggested to catalyse motivations to aspire lead users to pursue business success as well as to enhance entrepreneurship education policy. This study contributes to understanding the inclination of lead users towards becoming entrepreneurs and, especially, to emphasise the role of community involvement, which increases the likelihood of innovators to be entrepreneurs.

What attracts young talent from Taiwan to start businesses in mainland China? A fuzzy analytic hierarchy process study

ABSTRACT Innovation and entrepreneurship drive technological evolution, social progress, and economic development. With technological competition and a stagnant economy, innovation and entrepreneurship appear to be promising approaches to growing a country’s economy. Accordingly, in this study, we identified factors influencing the entrepreneurial process by systematically integrating the opinions of 43 experts into 5 aspects and 21 key indicators by using the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process. We focused on young Taiwanese entrepreneurs starting their businesses in China. The results revealed that marketing and business development, venture fund support, investment financing, interpersonal resources and convenience administrative service were exerted the greatest influence on the entrepreneurs’ decision-making process. The findings can serve as a reference for fostering a more entrepreneur-friendly environment, especially in China, whose government has actively encouraged innovation and entrepreneurship by, in part, attracting young talents from Taiwan. These results can also provide a reference for scholars interested in the field of youth entrepreneurship research.

(2015) Fragments of an Unfinished War: Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and the Partition of China, written by Françoise Mengin

(2015) Fragments of an Unfinished War: Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and the Partition of China, written by Françoise Mengin

Are Taiwanese Entrepreneurs a Strategic Group?

This article applies the “strategic group” concept to Taiwanese entrepreneurs (taishang), who have businesses in both Taiwan and Mainland China, to analyze their political agency in safeguarding their collective interests. Based on extensive fieldwork, the authors look at taishang collective action in both formal and informal settings to assess whether the taishang can be considered a strategic group in contemporary cross-Strait relations.

Françoise Mengin, Fragments of an Unfinished War: Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and the Partition of China

Françoise Mengin, Fragments of an Unfinished War: Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and the Partition of China

Taishang Studies

The study of Taiwanese entrepreneurs who live and invest on the Chinese mainland (Taishang) has only recently started to attract attention. Taishang have been referred to as a “linkage community” that connects Taiwan and the Chinese mainland through its economic undertakings, political influence, and social experiences as a migrant community. Against this background, this article clarifies the extent to which Taishang have contributed to and shaped the ongoing process of cross-strait interaction and the development of cross-strait policies. It revisits the field of Taishang studies, takes stock of the knowledge that this field has generated so far, and explores future directions for meaningful research.

Fragments of an unfinished war: Taiwanese entrepreneurs and the partition of China

Fragments of an unfinished war: Taiwanese entrepreneurs and the partition of China

Foreign and Domestic Firms Growing Apart: Learning- vs. Capability-based Imprinting

Using 60 interviews with large-sized Taiwanese and Chinese domestic apparel firms in southern China, this article contributes to the organizational imprinting literature in two ways through 1) disentangling learning-based versus capability-based imprinting mechanisms; and 2) directly comparing the imprinted and non-imprinted organizations. The first contribution comes from a comparison one group at two different times. Taiwanese entrepreneurs embedded in the global apparel value chain carry the imprint of forty years of experience with one business model, and have twice encountered the combined challenges of rising labor cost, increasing labor shortage and currency appreciation. These two encounters offer an ideal research opportunity to disentangle the learning- and capability-based imprinting mechanisms. The first time (i.e., late 1980s in Taiwan), they failed to learn alternative strategies, such as developing their own brands for the domestic market when moving to the mainland, and continued their focus on the export market. The second time (i.e., ongoing challenges on the mainland), although they have learned the potential of branding for the Chinese domestic market from the success of local domestic entrepreneurs, they lack the essential capabilities for pursuing such strategic reorientation. The second contribution is based on the coexistence of both Taiwanese and Chinese domestic entrepreneurs, which permits the direct comparison of imprinted vs. non-imprinted entrepreneurs. Without the imprint of global apparel value chains, the domestic entrepreneurs have successfully entered the domestic market.

Taiwan, Manchukuo, and the Sino-Japanese War

With the establishment of Manchukuo in 1932, Manchuria turned into Taiwan’s most important area to trade with in Chinese mainland. Taiwanese entrepreneurs from countryside and urban areas of Taiwan joined this “international” trade mostly opened by the Japanese merchants and the Japanese government. The reinforcement of the Taiwan-Manchukuo trade was made at the cost of the Manchukuo-Inland China trade. When the overseas Chinese in the Southeast Asia decreased their purchase of Taiwanese products which had been categorized as “Japanese” products because of Japanese invasion against China, the Taiwanese exclaimed that the imperial army in Manchukuo and North China had saved their economy. This historical account discloses that the Taiwanese and mainlanders who had to live together in the postwar Taiwan had actually been opposing with each other during the Sino-Japanese War. It explains to some extent the two ethnic groups’ much congruent memory of Japan in the post-1945 Taiwan.

Foreign factors in Taiwan's economic transformation

This paper aims to explore the foreign influences on Taiwan's economic transformation over the past 40 years. While exports have always been important in sustaining Taiwan's economic growth, the driving force behind exports has changed from inward investment to outward investment. The analysis carried out is from an international political economy perspective and takes a historical overview. It argues that the US, Japan and China pursued economic policies based on their own economic interests. These foreign governments’ economic policies together with their entrepreneurs’ business interests are the more important variables for shaping Taiwan's economic structure. During the 1960s, without the US's financial guarantees for American MNCs and security guarantees for the island, the KMT's foreign investment promotion policy would not have been as successful as it was when Taiwan faced a military threat from China. The US and Japanese economic policies changed, and since the 1970s competition between their businesses in the world market has integrated Taiwan into a regional production network. Subsequent to the Sino-US rapprochement, the US gradually opened up its market towards China. With America's rising trade barriers against Taiwanese-made products, Taiwanese entrepreneurs found profits by investing in China. Even though the Taiwanese Government tried hard to pull back the mounting outward investment in China, it was unable to achieve it. In contrast to the traditional point of view, this paper offers insights into the economic interaction between first the US and Japan and later between the US and China that resulted in Taiwan's economic transformation.

Between Dependency and Autonomy – Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and Local Chinese Governments

This paper focuses on the changing interaction between Taiwanese entrepreneurs and local Chinese governments. Through the analysis of this changing process, it can be seen that Taiwanese businesses are a special “asset” of Chinese governments. The main argument of this paper is that both central and local governments in China have strategic considerations in respect of Taiwanese businesses. The Chinese central government values Taiwanese businesses because more Taiwanese investment in China strengthens the Beijing government in negotiations with the Taibei government. Nevertheless, since the Kuomintang (KMT) (Guomindang) regained power in 2008, the strategic value of Taiwanese businesses in the cross-Strait relationship seems to have decreased. The central government has created a profitable macro-environment enabling local officials to give a warm welcome to Taiwanese businesses. Chinese local governments value Taiwanese businessmen not only because of the central government's deliberate policy but also because they are pursuing their own self-interest. This paper firstly focuses on the changing interaction between Taiwanese businesses and Chinese local governments. It then further analyses the different but complementary interests of both central and local governments in China in relation to Taiwanese investors.

State- and context-dependent information management and wealth accumulation: an intercultural information analysis among the billionaires in Asia, Taiwan and China

From the Forbes Magazine survey of the world's 538 richest, 77 or about 14.4% were identified as born in Asia (Asia Week, June 28, 2001). In addition, the top 100 billionaires (in $NT) in Taiwan, 2001 and 2002 were surveyed by Taiwan Smart Monthly magazine (November 11, 2002) and another top 100 billionaires in China (in US dollars) were reported by the Forbes magazine in 2004. This paper utilises Liu, Lin, Lee and Chou's (1997) state- and context-dependent information management model specification and equity account-dependent variables to study the underlying intercultural factors affecting the richest 77 Asian and the top 100 Taiwanese and Chinese entrepreneurs, respectively, by such attributes and characteristics as shown in the Bamboo network (Weidenbaun and Hughes, 1996) and Liu and Gawford (1996). Using regression and categorical techniques, this paper shows that important intercultural information factors affecting the world's richest Asian billionaires are age, marital status, Chinese cultural background and self-made accomplishment, economic and national business condition, education, training and Total Quality Management, and the Human Development Index, etc. While most billionaires in Taiwan came from the Information Technology (IT) industry, but due to different stage of IT development, many billionaires in China were found in real estate and manufacturing management.

Uncertainty, Learning and Error Elimination: Taiwanese Entrepreneurs in Mainland China

ABSTRACT This article presents a dynamic model of the entrepreneurial process based on Weber's and Schutz's theories of human agency. It argues that human agents accumulate experience as they make sense out of their everyday business life. Experiences from everyday life are assembled into a stock of knowledge that can be used to interpret incoming events as well as problem solving. If incoming events are repeated and familiar, the entrepreneur can utilize the rule of thumb to solve problems without difficulties. If incoming events are novel, the entrepreneur's interpretative framework will fail to give an adequate account of the new situation. Encountering this situation, some agents may continue to use old methods to solve new problems. This response does not catch up with market's expectation and is doomed to fail. Most entrepreneurs will devise new methods to solve new problems by trial and error, and experimentation. They will cope with their knowledge deficiency by creating temporary expectations. This knowledge surrogate will be later tested in the market. If a new strategy works, then it will be adopted and further routinized as a rule of thumb. This theoretical framework is applied to Taiwanese entrepreneurs investing in mainland China. Two case studies in the food and catering industries are conducted. This article concludes that the theory of entrepreneurial process in terms of learning, experimentation, and revision of plans provides us with useful understanding of survival, growth, expansion of an enterprise.

Type A behaviour at work – an empirical study of Taiwanese managers and entrepreneurs

Bortner's Type A Behaviour Questionnaires were used to explore the work behaviour of Chinese managers and entrepreneurs in Taiwan and to investigate how that behaviour was influenced by occupation, age and gender. One hundred and seventeen subjects participated in the study, of which 45 were also interviewed. The mean score on the questionnaire was 74.68, the median (74) and the mode (76) within a scoring range of 0–140. Eighty-four subjects registered scores of 80 or less (Type B behaviour) and 33 came within the mid-range of 81–120. None of the subjects registered scores of 121–40 (Type A behaviour). The highest score of 113 was registered by a female bank vice-president and the lowest (47) by a male manager working in a charitable organization and about to retire. The results are discussed within the context of Chinese cultural traditional and parenting practices, the unique characteristics of Taiwan's recent history and the subjects' career experience.

Taiwanese Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Canada and Transnational Social Space

AbstractThis article explores the migration of Taiwanese immigrant entrepreneurs to Canada and their transnationalism. Their presence in Canada is documented and described with statistical data on their demographic characteristics, human capital, and economic capital. An assessment of their transnationalism is provided by primary qualitative data gathered through in‐depth interviews. Overall, the review of the literature on Taiwanese migration to various countries, and their transnationalism, indicates that research has primarily been conducted in Australia and the United States, while it remained understudied in Canada. The article makes a case for contextualizing Taiwanese entrepreneurial migration in terms of a global immigration marketplace and the specific business migration programmes in Australia, United States, and Canada. Further, the article argues for the appropriateness of conceptualizing these Taiwanese entrepreneurs as operating within the theoretical framework of transnational social space. The findings on transnational social space include the importance of transnational familial networks, transnational business circuits, and transmigration. Transnational familial networks constitute a form of “capital” as the dispersal is a “resource”. The transnational business circuits include three types: (1) Asian production‐North American distribution; (2) retail chains; and (3) import‐export, all spatially distributed with their multiple national sites. In selected areas of the presentation and discussion of the data the policy implications of the findings are explored. These include discussion of the implications of this transnationalism on Canadian policies such as immigration, multiculturalism, business development, international trade, economic development, and citizenship. There is clearly a lack of harmonization among migration policy and other social and economic policies in Canada. While Canadian multiculturalism policy facilitates transnationalism, Canadian citizenship policy is shown to conflict with and discourage transnational practices.

Teaching English in Taiwan: issues of inequality and low motivation

A discussion of the impact of parental demand on the terms of employment of imported native-speaking and local non-native-speaking teachers in private language schools.As more and more parents realize the importance of learning the language at an early stage, the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to young learners has become a lucrative adventure for Taiwanese entrepreneurs. Taiwanese students and parents alike represent a stable and growing market, at least for now. The demand for both Native Speaking (NS) and Non-Native Speaking (NNS) teachers is also on the rise and can certainly be attributed to the flourishing EFL industry in Taiwan. However, there is a distinctively huge difference in the pay and reward policies and practices for the two kinds of teacher. This article touches on relatively sensitive issues concerning NS/NNS as EFL teachers and as members of staff.

Business Should Be Its Own Therapist: Observing the "Governance Ethics" of Taiwanese Enterprises

Taiwanese enterprises generally display a tacit acceptance and practice of globally-recognized business ethics such as the respect of human rights. Yet some Taiwanese business supervisors subscribe instead to a philosophy of leadership, dubbed "pseudo-harmony", which actively seeks to evade responsibility and any conflict of interest with profitability. Meanwhile other Taiwanese entrepreneurs are even less enlightened, dictatorially upholding self-serving regimes which operate on a philosophy which is euphemistically referred to as "householder management".

The relationship of ethical decision-making to business ethics and performance in taiwan

This paper examines the relationship of ethical decision-making by individuals to corporate business ethics and organizational performance of three groups: (i) SMEs (small and medium enterprises), (ii) Outstanding SMEs (the Key Stone Award winners) and (iii) Large Enterprises, in order to provide a reference for Taiwanese entrepreneurs to practice better business ethics. The survey method involved random sampling of 132 enterprises within three groups. Some 524 out of 1320 questionnaires were valid. The survey results demonstrated that ethical decision-making by individuals, corporate business ethics and organizational performance are highly related. In summary, then, high levels of organizational performance were directly attributable to high levels of applied corporate and individual ethics. Furthermore, there is a demonstrable tendency for Outstanding SMEs to reject ethically unsound practices such as padded expense accounts, tax evasion and misleading advertising. The measurement criteria used to assess organizational performance, however, did not include an objective evaluation of financial performance.