A Study On The Relationship Between Entrepreneurial Alertness,Entrepreneurial Bricolage And Entrepreneurial Opportunity Identification In New Ventures

Since 40 years of reform and opening up,China’s economy is experiencing a critical period of transformation from high-speed growth to a high-quality growth phase.With the background of economic transformation and the promotion of national entrepreneurship support policies,China’s entrepreneurial activities are booming.The ever-increasing number of newly-created business enterprises has provided strong support for China to promote rapid economic development,optimize economic structure upgrade and expand employment.However,as the number of start-ups continues to rise,the dynamic and complex external environment,increasing industry competition and lack of entrepreneurial experience poses a series of challenges to the survival and development of start-ups.Most of the "small and weak" start-ups find it difficult to survive and grow under such circumstances,leading to the increasing failure rate of start-ups in China.As the beginning and the most important part of entrepreneurial activities,the effective identification of entrepreneurial opportunities is a necessary factor for the success of entrepreneurship,so the research on entrepreneurial opportunity identification has been receiving much attention from academics.While entrepreneurial opportunity recognition,as an individual’s active behavior to explore the external environment,is strongly subjective and is inevitably influenced by individual cognitive factors.Entrepreneurial alertness,as a unique cognitive characteristic of individuals,reflects the ability of entrepreneurs to perceive and process internal and external information,and thus has an important impact on the process of entrepreneurial opportunity recognition.Through combing related studies,we found that the influence of entrepreneurial alertness on entrepreneurial opportunity recognition has had rich theoretical and empirical studies,but the related studies have mostly studied the relationship between entrepreneurial alertness as an overall concept and ignored the differences in the role of entrepreneurial alertness on entrepreneurial opportunity recognition in different dimensions.Meanwhile,the important role of entrepreneurial bricolage as a favorable means for start-ups to break through the resource constraint dilemma has been recognized by theory and practice,but there is still a need for further research on how entrepreneurial bricolage plays a role in the process of entrepreneurial alertness affecting entrepreneurial opportunity recognition.To address the traditional dilemma of "why some people can identify entrepreneurial opportunities overlooked by others," this study investigates the relationship between entrepreneurial alertness and entrepreneurial opportunity recognition in different dimensions based on entrepreneurial cognition theory,entrepreneurial bricolage theory and resource orchestration theory,and discusses the mediating role of entrepreneurial bricolage and the moderating role of entrepreneurial passion on this basis.The moderating role of entrepreneurial passion is discussed.This study uses SPSS23.0 and AMOS24.0 to conduct empirical tests with data from a sample of 304 start-ups,and the results show that all three dimensions of entrepreneurial alertness(scanning and search,association and connection,and evaluation and judgment)have a significant positive effect on entrepreneurial opportunity recognition.Entrepreneurial bricolage positively affects entrepreneurial opportunities identification.Among them,selective bricolage promotes the effect more significantly.Both dimensions of entrepreneurial bricolage mediate between entrepreneurial alertness and entrepreneurial opportunities identification.Entrepreneurial passion positively moderates the relationship between entrepreneurial bricolage and entrepreneurial opportunities identification.The findings extend the theoretical research on topics related to entrepreneurial alertness,further enrich the research results on entrepreneurial opportunity identification paths,and provide a reference for the practice of entrepreneurial opportunity identification in new ventures.