Research On The Influence Of Entrepreneurs' Alumni Network Ties On Start-up SMEs' Performance In China

Social network theories believe that in social network there are resources,which help company building their competitive advantage.In the venture stage,companies develop themselves with limited resources inside and complicated competitive environment outside.The ability of company to get resource and information from social network is important for the company to survival in the competitive market.Due to the transform of economic construction and economic system,start-up business is crucial to the improvement of the business structure.The social network with large size and high quality has diverse and reliable information.In this kind of social network,members have multiple identities.There is high level of emotional supporting and business supporting among members.In Alumni network of entrepreneurs,alumnus share culture and sense of belonging.They have same feeling with alma mater.So the reliability between alumni maintain in a high level.The alumni of comprehensive university with various professional backgrounds act a part in various fields in the society.So alumni network is a network with large size and high quality.The competition between companies is more complicated not only the traditional competition of resources but also the competition of the ability of knowledge acquisition.Identification and acquisition of knowledge influence the core competitiveness of company.This paper selects performance of new venture as the research object.This paper focuses on the influence mechanism of entrepreneur' alumni network to the performance.This paper measure entrepreneur' alumni network with the following three dimensions:network size,network intensity and centrality.This paper analyzes the relationship between entrepreneurs' alumni network and performance of new venture basing on theory of strong ties,weak ties and structure holes.This research collects data by questionnaire,and 315 valid questionnaires are collected.Through empirical analysis of data,the result shows that:Alumni network of entrepreneurs and performance of new venture are positive correlated and all three dimensions have positive influence on performance of new venture.And knowledge acquisition plays a mediating role in the relationship between network scales,network intensity and performance of new venture.This paper is organized as follows:the full text is divided into six parts.The first part is the introduction,which describes the background,the significance and innovative points of this research.The second part is literature review,which consists of three parts:entrepreneur' alumni network,knowledge acquisition and performance of new venture.The third part is theoretical analysis and research hypotheses.Strong ties theory,weak ties theory and structure holes theory are basis of a series of hypotheses.The fourth part is the empirical research design,which will describe the models,the sample selection,and the data sources.The last part shows the empirical results and the possible management recommendations,followed by the defects and further study of this paper.