A Study On Entrepreneurial Improvisation In Transient Competition

Under the transient competition,changing has become a normal phenomenon in entrepreneurship and the competitive advantage of firms last for very short time.Being consistent with the effectuation approach,new venture's improvisation—spontaneously utilizing hand resources to instantly and flexibly respond to uncertainties—becomes an efficient way to gain transient competitive advantage.However,research on organizational improvisation is still in the initial stage,and little work has been done to deeply understand the improvisation in entrepreneurship.Based on the transient competiting background,this study intends to elaborate the nature of new venture's improvisation and develop the classification and measures based on its characteristics firstly.Then,the author will explore what environmental and resource-related factors will lead to new venture's improvisation,as well as how new venture utilize different types of resources to improvise.At last the author will further analyze how new venture's improvisation influent sustainably.This research will expand the research on improvisation in entrepreneurship field,and help new ventures to gain competitiveness by improving their ability to improvise.First of all,the author reviews the related research in the field of research topic,combing and summarizing the existing literatures in the fields of transient competiting context,organizational improvisation,and entrepreneurial improvisation,summing up the research opportunities and challenges,and exploring the feasibility of research on entrepreneurial improvisation.Secondly,according to the four major problems:What does entrepreneurial improvisation mean?When does entrepreneurial improvisation happen?How does entrepreneurial improvisation occur?and Why does entrepreneurial improvisation happen?The author conducts three sub-studies to progressively develop the research frameworks of entrepreneurial improvisation.The first sub-study,by gathering and analyzing the existing research,the author summarizes the definition,classification,measurement,antecedents and outcomes of entrepreneurial improvisation in each artice,recognizes research gaps from these articles,and broadly builds a viable research framework to make recommendations on future research.The second sub-study applys multiple case study,through the interviews of founders from five founding teams founded in Wuhan East Lake High-tech Zone,to understand the new ventures' founding and development process and how they in response to various types of emergencies.From the data comes from multiple sources,the author identifys the existence and characteristics of improvisational behavior in entrepreneurship.The results of multi-case study show that market turbulence,competition intensity and time pressure are the three triggers of entrepreneurial improvisation.The entrepreneurial improvisation can be divided into two differet type:market regulations-based and social ties-based.The number of elite members in the founding teams affects their choice between the two types of entrepreneurial improvisation.The more elite members are,the more likely the founding team will adopt market regulations-based entrepreneurial improvisation.The constant and repeated entrepreneurial improvisation can gradually develope into a rountine in the cases to help new ventures to deal with environmental uncertainty and build long-term competitiveness.The third sub-research proposes the hypothesis on the basis of the theoretical literature,takes the founding teams as the research object,carries on the questionnaire survey to the founding teams of the sample new ventures,and then empirically tests and analyzes the hypothesized model.The results of the regression analysis show that TMS is the basis of the occurrence of improvisational behavior,and the positive relationship between founding team's TMS and entrepreneurial improvisation is moderated by the team's tolerance for short-life cycles.That is,when contains higher tolerance for short-life cycles,founding team's TMS will promote more entrepreneurial improvisation.Based on the resource perspective,executives essentially need stability and flexibility,so the author applys the exploration-exploitation model to distinguish two improvisational processes?exploring new resources to gain flexibility or exploiting existing resources to acquire efficiency(Lavie et al.,2010;March,1991).The foundation of entrepreneurial improvisation is the real-time use of new and complementary resources,thus the study pays attention to the role of resource factors,such as intermediary institutions and complementary assets,in founding teams' trade-off between two kinds of entrepreneurial improvisation.Finally,the author summarizes the main conclusions of the study,summs up the theoretical and practice contribution,and figures out the issues that need to be deeply considered in future researches.