The Impact Of College Students Social Network On Entrepreneurial Intention

Entrepreneurial activity can not only promote regional economic growth, but also promote market innovation and create many new jobs, so it is very important for a country's economic and social development. In the current era of knowledge economy, China wants to implement national innovation and entrepreneurship strategy to enhance the economic vitality, we can not do without a lot of entrepreneurial activity, particularly the knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial activities. The college students who received standard education for long-term is the main owner of knowledge and the important potential groups who can carry out the knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship. However, for college students, the actual rate of entrepreneurship in China is far less than that in the United States and Europe, the distance is obvious. The need for positive guidance and promotion is urgent. Currently in the academic area, social network has been seen as the important factor that has an obvious impact on the individual entrepreneurial activities. However, the study about how the social network impact individual entrepreneurial intention is still insufficient, lacking of the deep research on the impact mechanisms from the social cognition perspective.Based on the literature review, focusing on the basic question "how the social networks of entrepreneurial students impact the entrepreneurial intention", this study established the conceptual model of the relationship between entrepreneurial intention, social network features, entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial experience. Empirically, obtained 363 valid data through the questionnaire survey, we applied factor analysis, multiple linear regression analysis method to verify the hypotheses.The main conclusions:(1) Positive impact that entrepreneurial opportunity identification self-efficacy and risk tolerance self-efficacy have on entrepreneurial intentions is significant, indicating that college students have stronger entrepreneurial intentions when they perceive stronger confidence on their capacity of opportunity identification and risk tolerance limits.(2) College students with a large, strong relationships and high heterogeneity'social networks will have stronger entrepreneurial self-efficacy. While network with high centrality can only improve their entrepreneurial risk tolerance self-efficacy and it has no effect on the entrepreneurial opportunity identification self-efficacy. Entrepreneurial self-efficacy plays a part medium role in the relationship between social network features and entrepreneurial intention.(3) For college students with higher entrepreneurial experience, the strength of its network relationship can improve their entrepreneurial self-efficacy in a higher degree. However, the entrepreneurial experience's moderating effect on the relationship of the other three dimensions of social network features and the entrepreneurial self-efficacy is not significant.The main theoretical contributions:(1) From the perspective of social cognition, this study opened the black box that how the college students' social networks impact their entrepreneurial intention and found the medium role that the entrepreneurial self-efficacy plays in the relationship between social network features and entrepreneurial intention, further enriched and refined Social network theory and the study of entrepreneurial intention.(2) This study combined the individual features (entrepreneurial experience) and micro-environment (social network features), to explore the interaction between the two. and to find out for different individuals with different entrepreneurial experience, how the relationship between their social network features and entrepreneurial intention can be changed. The existing theory was expanded and improved.