Text

theses

The striking phenomenon of venture creation in regions such as Silicon Valley has attracted tremendous nascent entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, academic scholars and policy makers' attention. "if you start a technology business somewhere other than the San Francisco Bay area, New York, or Boston, you’re stacking the deck against yourself "(Wessel, 2013). Due to the success of Silicon Valley in innovation and economic benefits, many initiatives and efforts have been implemented by regional governments worldwide to replicate the "entrepreneurial ecosystem" (E-ecosystem) (Nylund & Cohen, 2017). However, compare to the widely held perception that E-ecosystem dramatically promote and accelerate venture creation, the E-ecosystem theory is undertheorized and underdeveloped, and glaring short of empirical analysis (Spigel, 2017). The fundamental questions for E-ecosystem, such as what is entrepreneurial ecosystem and its main components, how do E-ecosystems incubate and accelerate venture creation, are still unresolved and ambiguous. Without the operational guidelines, the mission for regional governments to nurture and foster an E-ecosystem is still far away and their efforts are not as fruitful as expected. To fill up the gap in the literature and deepen the recognition about regional venture creation, I propose a theoretical framework for E-ecosystem theory and holistically examine the structures and mechanisms. In addition, by using a sample of 2,318,007 technology firms which created from 2004 to 2015 in 285prefectural-level cities in China, I analyze the influence of E-ecosystem on regional venture creation and new venture fundraising. The empirical findings confirm the dynamic co-evolution and synergistic interactions in the E-ecosystem and provide practical recommendations for policy makers. The first essay is to develop the E-ecosystem theory and conceptualize the role of E-ecosystem through literature review and synthesis. To clearly define the boundaries and differentiate it from the proximate systems, I comparatively analyze the knowledge ecosystem, business ecosystem, E-ecosystem and regional clustering simultaneously. Drawing on the dynamic co-evolutionary approach, we propose that E-ecosystems with key components fit, match and integrate well would lower the fixed cost and barrier, eliminate start-up bottlenecks, speed up the entrepreneurial opportunity identification, enhance the regional entrepreneurial competition and commercialization efficiency, and raise the start-up survive rate and growth rate. The second essay is to empirically demonstrate the sponsorship influence of E-ecosystem on venture creation. To distinguish the E-ecosystem theory from resource base theory and verify that E-ecosystems are more than resource clustering, I investigate the dynamic co-evolution and synergistic interactions among the key components as well as resource munificence. The empirical evidence highlights the synergistic interactions and provides strong support for E-ecosystem sponsorship. This analysis suggest that governors should no longer merely concentrate on resource munificence or provide resources separately, but pay attention to the component balance and promote the mutual fit and match in the E-ecosystem. The third essay also explore and exploit the E-ecosystem theory by examining the effect of E-ecosystem on new venture fundraising. By utilizing a unique panel data from the dataset of (NECIPSD), I find that the regional E-ecosystems promote new ventures’ external capital raising directly by decreasing the information asymmetry between new ventures and venture capitalists, but localized fundraising competition depress the fundraising rate. The contributions, limitations and future research directions are also discussed.

ETD_8967

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Jiangshui Ma

doi:10.7282/T34B34SW

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.