| With the deepening of economic globalization,rapid technological changes,coupled with regional emergencies such as trade frictions、virus plagues and natural disasters,the business environment faced by enterprises is becoming increasingly uncertain.As an important means for enterprises to deal with the dynamics and complexity of the environment,strategic change has gradually become a normal state in the process of sustainable business development.As early as 1994,D’Avini proposed that as the uncertainty of the external environment intensifies,the society would enter the era of super competition,and the best strategy for enterprises was to seize the opportunity to carry out strategic change.Zhang Ruimin,an outstanding management practitioner in China,also believes that the development of an enterprise is essentially a change of strategy between the old and the new,and the old strategy is replaced by the new strategy without losing time,so as to win the sustainable development of the enterprise.There are many classic cases that make enterprises continue to be brilliant through strategic change,such as Huawei,IBM and other enterprises which have achieved considerable development through timely strategic changes.However,there are also a large number of enterprises’ strategic changes ended in failure.There are two main reasons: one is that they do not find and realize that the external environment has changed;the other is that although they are aware of the changes in the environment,they have not taken effective measures to deal with them,or they have launched strategic changes but failed because of various resistance.It can be seen that in the fierce market competition environment,timely adjustment of strategy can make the organization adapt to the changes in the internal and external environment,which is of great significance for the construction and maintenance of competitiveness of enterprises.The construction of enterprise’s competitive advantage is the core of strategic management.In order to cope with the changes of external environment and maintain competitive advantage,enterprises often carry out strategic changes.However,compared with the strong and mature enterprises,due to the "defects of new entrants" and limited resource endowment,the start-up enterprises will face severe challenges in the implementation and success of strategic change due to the lack of support from knowledge and experience,social network and resource endowment.The intervention of venture capital institutions can not only provide sufficient funds to effectively alleviate the constraints of venture capital bottlenecks,but also provide value-added services in strategic planning,network resources and management consulting,as well as supervision and control in financial management,corporate governance and incentive constraints,with its extensive social relations network and rich management practice experience,which can effectively help the entrepreneurial enterprises to grow rapidly and protect the enterprise’s strategic change.At present,around the theme of strategic change,scholars have carried out extensive discussions.There are many literatures on the concept,measurement and influencing factors of strategic change at home and abroad.Among them,a more systematic understanding of the connotation of strategic change has been reached,and a more mature measurement methodology of strategic change has basically been formed.As for the influencing factors of enterprise strategic change,the current research mainly focuses on the external environment,internal resources,change subject and enterprise performance.It is worth noting that few studies have explored how venture capital,as an important external stakeholder of an enterprise,is embedded from the outside to the inside of a start-up company to influence its strategic changes.As an important means to deal with uncertain factors,strategic change plays a key role in maintaining and establishing competitive advantage.However,in order to successfully carry out strategic changes,in addition to being inseparable from the company’s internal resource base and core capabilities,companies also rely on the support of various stakeholders.For start-ups,venture capital is an extremely important stakeholder.However,the current research focusing on the influence of venture capital on entrepreneurial firms’ strategic change is very limited.Based on this,this paper tries to study the following problems based on resource-based view,the behavioral theory of the firm and agency theory:first,whether the intervention of venture capital affect the strategic change of start-up enterprises? Second,focusing on the institutional characteristics of venture capital,this paper explores whether the impact of venture capital on the strategic change of start-ups is different due to different equity background and industry expertise? Third,based on the post-investment management of venture capital,is there any difference in the influence of different management methods on the strategic change of entrepreneurial enterprises ? Fourth,considering that the external environment is an important factor affecting the strategic change of enterprises,this paper analyzes the moderating effect of environmental uncertainty on the relationship between venture capital institutions and the strategic change of startup enterprises.The empirical research of this paper is based on the 264 start-up enterprises listed in small and medium-sized board during 2004-2014,using scientific research methods to test the hypothesis of the research problems.The results show that:Firstly,as for the influencing factors of enterprise strategic change,the current researches mainly focus on the external environment,internal resources,change subjects and enterprise performance.There are few researches on how venture capital,as an important external stakeholder of an enterprise,is embedded from the outside to the inside of a start-up enterprise to influence its strategic change.Based on this,this study firstly focuses on the impact of venture capital intervention on the strategic change of start-up enterprises;at the theoretical level,it discusses in detail from the three dimensions of dynamic support,resource support and management support,and through the empirical analysis of research samples,it is found that compared with entrepreneurial firms without venture capital intervention,venture capital intervention can promote the strategic change of entrepreneurial firms.Secondly,the influence of venture capital with different characteristics on the strategic change of start-up enterprises is different.This research has selected two representative perspectives of institutional characteristics of equity background and industry expertise;in terms of equity background,it makes a detailed demonstration from three perspectives: investment purpose,resource support and management support;in terms of industry expertise,it makes in depth discussion from three aspects of experience,resources and reputation.Through the empirical analysis of this sample,it is found venture capital with non-governmental background or high industry expertise can better promote the strategic change of start-up enterprises.Thirdly,in the whole process of venture capital,post investment management plays an important role.This study systematically analyzes the impact of post investment management on the strategic change of start-up enterprises from two dimensions of value-added services and supervision and control.In the dimension of value-added services,it is demonstrated in detail from the perspectives of strategic planning,network resources and management consulting;in the dimension of supervision and management,it is discussed from three aspects: financial management,corporate governance and incentive.Through the empirical analysis of the sample of this paper,it is found the value-added services or supervision and control provided by venture capital have a positive impact on the strategic change of start-up enterprises.Fourthly,as an open system,enterprises always depends on the contingency of the external environment,which is an important factor influencing the implementation and success of strategic changes.Based on this,this paper studies in detail the moderating mechanism of environmental uncertainty on the relationship between venture capital institutions and the strategic change of start-up enterprises.Through rigorous theoretical deduction and empirical analysis of data samples,the results show that: in terms of institutional characteristics;the higher the uncertainty faced by startup enterprises,the more positive influence the industry expertise of venture capital has on the strategic change of start-up enterprises.In terms of management methods,the higher the uncertainty faced by start-up enterprises,the more positive influence the supervision and control provided by venture capital institutions has on the strategic change of start-up enterprises.Fifthly,the paper further analyzes the impact of venture capital on strategic deviation.With the gradual improvement of China’s institutional environment and the continuous development of market economy,enterprises will also face the dual pressure from the consistency of institutional environment and the differentiation from market competition.Therefore,based on the institutional theory and strategic theory,this paper further analyzes the impact of venture capital intervention on the strategic deviation of start-up enterprises.The results show that: compared with the venture capital backed venture enterprises,the strategic deviation of venture capital backed venture enterprises is smaller,but when the venture capital is involved,its own industry expertise and supervision and control will promote the enterprise When the uncertainty of the external environment becomes more and more serious,the supervision and control of venture capital will strengthen the promotion of strategic deviation.The main contributions of this paper are as follows: firstly,in the current research on the strategic change of start-up enterprises,more attention has been paid to the shaping role of the enterprise’s own resource base and external environment for strategic change,and limited attention has been paid to the influence of enterprise stakeholders.For entrepreneurial firms,venture capital is a very important stakeholder.It can not only help enterprises solve the financial problem,but also help them grow rapidly through their own industry expertise and network resources.In this process,venture capital plays an important role in the strategic change of start-up enterprises.In view of this,this paper introduces the subject of venture capital into the study of strategic change of start-up enterprises,and discusses it from the three mechanisms of dynamic mechanism,resource support and management support,which enriches and deepens the understanding of the influencing factors of start-up enterprises’ strategic change.Secondly,due to the differences in investment purpose,investment logic and resource endowment,venture capital institutions with different characteristics will adapt and adjust resources according to their own preference and investment logic to obtain expected returns.For start-up enterprises,what kind of investment partners are introduced is related to the effectiveness of resource allocation and strategic change.Therefore,based on the perspective of institutional characteristics of venture capital,this study selects two representative dimensions of equity background and industry expertise,and constructs a model of the relationship between venture capital with different institutional characteristics and the strategic changes of start-up companies,which provides an important reference for guiding the development of venture capital industry and the decision-making of introducing venture capital into enterprises.Thirdly,the post-investment management of venture capital is relatively a rising star in the field of venture capital research.The existing research on post-investment management embeds some aspects of post-investment management into other research and lacks systematic research.Therefore,based on the perspective of post-investment management of venture capital,this article systematically studies the influence of venture capital’management methods on the strategic changes of start-up enterprises.In the dimension of value-added services,it can be divided into three aspects: value-added services based on strategic planning,value-added services based on network resources and value-added services based on management consulting.In the dimension of supervision and control,it can be divided into three aspects: supervision and control based on financial management,supervision and control based on corporate governance and supervision and control based on incentive constraints.This paper systematically sorts out and establishes the analysis framework of post-investment management of venture capital,which deepens the research on post-investment of venture capital to a certain extent.Fourthly,the environmental uncertainty is incorporated into the decision-making model of strategic change.When the environment is in a high degree of uncertainty,venture capital will face greater investment pressure which will affect its judgment and preference for the strategic orientation of the invested company,and will adapt to the company’s strategy in the post-investment management process to respond to environmental changes.Therefore,this paper further discusses the impact of institutional characteristics and management methods of venture capital on the strategic change of start-up enterprises in the context of environmental uncertainty.It not only expands the existing theoretical boundaries,but also helps to improve the condition factors of strategic change and enhance the practical significance of the research model.Fifthly,institutional theory requires enterprises to follow industry practices in order to obtain legitimacy and resources,while strategic theory holds that enterprises should implement differentiation in order to establish competitive advantage.Therefore,"seeking common ground or reserving differences" is another important strategic behavior about the development of enterprises,which involves the concept of strategic deviation that deviates from the mainstream strategy of the industry.Therefore,based on the institutional theory and strategic theory,this paper further analyzes the impact of venture capital on the strategic deviation of start-up enterprises,and forms a good complement to the research on strategic change that deviates from the company’s own strategy,and deepens the impact of venture capital on enterprise’s strategic changes,and provides a more sufficient theoretical basis for the decision-making and implementation of corporate strategy.Finally,the empirical research on the impact of venture capital on the strategic change of start-up enterprises in China is groundbreaking.At present,the research of the influence of venture capital on the strategic change of start-up enterprises from the perspective of external "embedding" is still in its infancy at home and abroad,and most of the existing studies take the data of venture capital and start-up enterprises in western developed countries as samples.This paper takes the large sample under the Chinese situation as the research object,and taking into account the factors of China’s market environment,which not only has the theoretical extension significance,but also has a stronger policy value for China. |
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