The Effect Of Entrepreneur Ability On International Entrepreneurship Performance Of SEMs

SMEs in China develop rapidly in the new era. According to the statistics, thenumber of SMEs has reached56.51million by2012. China’s total export volumearrived2048.93billion USD in2012, while its total import volume reached1817.83billion USD, the vast majority of which were created by China’s SMEs (Statisticsfrom the Ministry of Commerce,2012). Chinese government actively encourages thedevelopment of SMEs. For instance, the Administrative Measures of Special Fund forSMEs’ Development, jointly issued by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry ofIndustrial Information and Technology in2012, was designed to solve financingchallenge facing SMEs and create good environment for them to grow up, bystrengthening taxation support for SMEs.SMEs in our country play a dominant role in international entrepreneurshipbuilding, mainly in the way of export processing. From the perspective ofentrepreneur, this paper studies entrepreneur ability and its influences exerting onenterprises’ international business performance. This paper divided entrepreneurabilities into managerial ability, strategic ability, interpersonal ability, ability tocapture opportunities, innovative ability, and learning ability, while internationalbusiness performance incorporates financial performance and non-financialperformance.Results of this research shows that managerial ability, strategic ability andinterpersonal ability have positive relationships with financial performance ofinternational entrepreneurship, while strategic ability and ability to captureopportunity significantly influencing the non-financial performance. And this paperexplains the reasons why entrepreneurs’ learning ability and innovative ability haveno significant impacts on neither of the two kinds of performance. That is becausesmall and medium-sized manufacturers or service firms devote little attention toproduct innovation. In consequence, SMEs should attach considerable importance toinnovation and learning, and encourage all staff to improve their learning ability andapply their knowledge in the workplace.In the final part of this paper, we draw conclusions, comes up with practicalsuggestions, and pinpoints the limitations of this study. We propose that entrepreneursof SMEs should give priority to enhancing their managerial ability and ability tocapture opportunities, which are for dealing with internal and external affairs respectively. Meanwhile, SMEs should pay sufficient attention to innovation andspeeding up its upgrading. Last but not least, they should also better theirunderstanding of local values of the host country during its internationalentrepreneurship building process. Our future study will focus on improving thecurrent model by adding into a moderating or mediating variable, and applyingvarious empirical methods to examine the new model. Simultaneously, we willenlarge the sample size and build an index system for exclusively measuringSME-entrepreneur ability.