The role of social and human capital among nascent entrepreneurs

This study examines nascent entrepreneurship by comparing individuals engaged in nascent activities (n=380) with a control group (n=608), after screening a sample from the general population (n=30,427). The study then follows the developmental process of nascent entrepreneurs for 18 months. Bridging and bonding social capital, consisting of both strong and weak ties, was a robust predictor for nascent entrepreneurs, as well as for advancing through the start-up process. With regard to outcomes like first sale or showing a profit, only one aspect of social capital, viz. being a member of a business network, had a statistically significant positive effect. The study supports human capital in predicting entry into nascent entrepreneurship, but only weakly for carrying the start-up process towards successful completion.     

The impact of venture capital on the persistence of innovation activities of start-ups

In this study we investigate the impact of early stage venture capital on innovation activities of start-ups. This is done based on a cohort of start-ups that is representative of all firms founded in Switzerland in 1996/97, as recorded by a census of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office for this period. We analyze not only the impact of early stage venture capital on innovation performance 3 years after firm foundation, but also 6 and 9 years after firm start, respectively, for those firms that survived and reported continuously innovation activities (persistence of innovation). The results support neither the hypothesis of a positive impact on initial innovation activities nor the hypothesis of a positive time-persistent effect on innovation performance of start-ups.     

Hindering or enabling structural social capital to enhance buyer performance? The role of relational social capital at two levels in China

Purpose: In its cognitive, relational, and structural forms, social capital has been identi?ed as a powerful strategic tool. However, prior empirical studies focus only on the direct effect of various dimensions of social capital and address relational social capital at either a dyadic level or a network level. Drawing on the social capital theory and social network theory, this study fills the above-mentioned gaps by examining the role of structural and relational social capital on performance through exploring direct and interaction effects simultaneously and revealing the moderating effect of relational social capital at the dyadic and network levels (including business ties and political ties) simultaneously.

Methodology/Approach: Based on data for 393 distributors from China, a moderated regression analysis is used to test the hypotheses.

Findings: The empirical test generally supports the hypotheses and indicates that the value of structural social capital is conditional on both curvilinear and linear moderating effects of relational social capital: the moderating effects of business ties on the structural social capital–buyer performance relationship is inverted U-shaped, while the moderating effects of relational social capital at the dyadic level and political ties on the structural social capital–buyer performance relationship is positive.

Research Implications: This study incorporates all three dimensions of social capital, represents one of the first attempts to examine the interplay between structural and relational social capital in emerging economies, explores relational social capital at the dyadic and network levels simultaneously, and responses to the fact that buyer–supplier relationships (BSRs) are embedded within a larger context of social networks. By addressing these issues, this study sheds new light on the individual and joint impact of various dimensions of social capital and provides new evidence on both the positive and negative aspects of social capital in a single model.

Practical Implications: The results provide important implications for managers in addressing social capital in an emerging economy. In order to improve performance, managers should first encourage and foster frequent, diverse, scarce, and high-quality information exchange and interactions to accumulate structural social capital. Additionally, managers should not only emphasize relational social capital building and development in BSRs, but also pay attention to the cultivation of relational social capital among the business network. They should acknowledge the persistent positive effect of political ties and the potential negative effect of business ties.

Originality/Value/Contribution: First, few studies examine both the individual and synergetic effects of various dimensions of social capital in a single model or explicitly explore relational social capital in a dyadic relationship and deeply consider it at the network level in a single model. This study addresses these issues.     

Shaping and re-shaping social capital in buyer-supplier relationships

Social capital plays an important role in explaining how value is created from firms' network relationships, but little is understood about how social capital is shaped over time and how it is re-shaped when firms consolidate their network ties. In response, this study explores the evolution of social capital in buyer-supplier relationships through a case study of a company undertaking radical product innovation, and examines the corresponding changes in the firm's network of buyer-supplier relationships. The analysis shows that social capital is built in a decidedly non-linear and non-uniform manner. The study also reveals considerable interaction among the dimensions of social capital throughout the evolution of the firm's network, and emphasizes the importance of the cognitive dimension—a feature receiving little attention thus far. The evidence shows, too, that efforts to strengthen social capital need to increase when network ties are sacrificed to prevent unintended consequences for firms' longer-term value creation.     

Asymmetric roles of business ties and political ties in product innovation

This study investigates the asymmetric roles of business ties and political ties in innovation processes. The study posits that business ties strengthen organizational competence and enhance the environmental fit. In contrast, political ties increase the environmental fit but ossify organizational internal routines. The study uses an extensive survey on 766 Chinese firms across multiple sectors to test hypotheses. The empirical results provide strong supports for hypotheses by showing that: (1) business ties have a positive impact on product innovation, indicating that despite different types of business ties, they share common features in enhancing product innovation; (2) political ties have an inverted U-shaped relationship with product innovation, indicating that the positive effect of political ties on product innovation would diminish as the costs of political ties outweigh the benefits.     

Social capital of entrepreneurs and small firm performance: A meta-analysis of contextual and methodological moderators

Despite a surge of studies examining the role of social capital in the entrepreneurial process, no quantitative assessments exist of the empirical evidence to date. To resolve seemingly conflicting results, we conducted a meta-analysis of the link between entrepreneurs' personal networks and small firm performance and identify new moderators affecting this relationship. Analyses of 61 independent samples indicated that the social capital–performance link was positive and significant (r_c = .211). Effect sizes of weak ties were smaller than those of structural holes, while network diversity had the largest positive effect on performance. Results also showed that the social capital–performance link depends on the age of small firms, the industry and institutional contexts in which they operate, and on the specific network or performance measures used. Based on these findings, we develop recommendations for future research on the contingent value of social capital for small firms.     

商业“她时代”萌芽下的中国“裙子CEO”资本初探

对于"裙子CEO",早已引起社会广泛关注。研究显示:人力资本、社会资本以及人丽资本三者共同促成了女CEO这一特殊人才的形成。其人力资本与企业绩效是成正相关,发挥作用最大;社会资本这把双刃剑对于女CEO来说还是处于一个"凸弧"的上升阶段,还未发挥其最大的效用,有待开发;人丽资本对女CEO工作是有帮助的。研究同时表明:人力资本的形成过程中,IQ比EQ起的作用要稍大一些,说明在社会资本的组成里,情商要比智商更加重要。研究成果进一步表明,不仅人们不能带着有色眼镜看待女CEO,而且为正在奋斗成为女CEO路上的女高官以及普通女职员们指明了一个正确的职业导向,即加强学习,努力增强自己的人力资本,才能尽快地化茧成蝶。     

Are ICT,Workplace Organization,and Human Capital Relevant for Innovation? A Comparative Swiss/Greek Study

This paper investigates and compares the relationships for Swiss and Greek firms between indicators for the intensity of use of modern information and communications technologies (ICT), several forms of workplace organization, and human capital, on the one hand, and several measures of innovation performance at firm level, on the other hand. For the Swiss firms, we find that ICT contribute to innovation activities (a) as enablers of process innovation (but not of product innovation) and (b) as means for increasing the efficiency of the R&D process. The organizational variables for “work design” and “employee voice” show significant positive correlations for most innovation indicators. Human capital matters primarily for R&D activities. The findings for the Greek firms indicate positive correlations of ICT with product and process innovation and of new “work design” with product innovation and R&D. No correlation of human capital with innovation could be found. No complementarities for the three factors with respect to innovation performance could be detected in either country.     

Performance Implications of a Retail Purchasing Network: The Role of Social Capital

This study employs social capital theory to examine how a retail buyer's network of industry peers influences retail performance. We propose that performance is enhanced by three network resources – access, referral, and influence – that result from two structural facets of a retail buyer's network: contact diversity and contact position. We test the model by collecting sociometric data that measures interpersonal ties among 84 retail buyers operating in the same geographic territory in the U.S. golf industry. The results offer evidence that network resources lead to higher levels of performance, even when accounting for differences in human capital and organizational resources. The paper concludes with a discussion of managerial and theoretical implications.     

R&D,Human Capital and Export Behavior of Manufacturing and Service Firms in Ghana

ABSTRACT

The paper carries out a detailed analysis of the effects of R&D and human capital as well as their interactions with innovation on export behavior of manufacturing and service firms in Ghana using a dataset of 720 firms that merges the Enterprise, Innovative Capability and the Innovation Follow-up Surveys respectively for Ghana. Using a bivariate probit regression, the results show that R&D and human capital (employees’ education, slack time and formal training) are positive and significantly related to the propensity for firms to export in Ghana. The cross derivatives (differences) for the interaction terms (R&D and innovation, and education and innovation) also showed that these interaction terms have positive effects on the likelihood for firms to export but are significant only for a negligibly small fraction of the sample. Thus, there is no much statistically significant evidence in support of the mediation role of innovation in the relationship between R&D/education and the export behavior.     

The effect of technology management capability on new product development in China’s service-oriented manufacturing firms: a social capital perspective

Abstract

Technology management capability (TMC) and new product development (NPD) are important for China’s service-oriented manufacturers to achieve competitive advantage. In this study, TMC is conceptualized as comprising of four sub-level capabilities: searching, selecting, implementation and learning capabilities. Drawing from the theory of social capital, we hypothesize that social capital plays a role in the relationship between TMC and NPD performance. Our findings indicate that NPD performance and social capital are influenced by all the four sub-capabilities of TMC but the effect of each capability of TMC varies. Selecting capability is more significantly and positively related with NPD performance, while learning capability exerts the most significant positive effect on social capital. Moreover, our empirical findings indicate the partial mediating role of social capital in the process of TMC influencing NPD performance. This study makes a particular contribution to the literature by providing a more complete understanding of how social capital plays a role in the relationship between TMC and NPD performance. In terms of managerial implications, our results indicate that improving TMC is essential in enhancing a service-oriented manufacturing firm’s NPD performance. Managers should also pay particular attention to nurturing social capital as a pathway to realize the true value of TMC.     

Entrepreneurial orientation,market orientation,network ties,and performance: Study of entrepreneurial firms in a developing economy

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO), market orientation (MO) and network ties are typically modeled as separate antecedents of performance. However, the boundary conditions for such models are under-explored, as is their applicability to developing economy settings. Accordingly, drawing on institutional and social capital theories, the current paper argues that the performance benefits of EO and MO are complementary, and vary across different levels of social and business network ties. Using primary data gathered from entrepreneurial firms operating in Ghana, the study findings indicate that aligning high levels of EO and MO improves business performance, and particularly so when social and business network ties are well developed, since under these latter conditions, the performance benefits of aligning EO and MO are greatest.     

Human capital and entrepreneurial success: A meta-analytical review

The study meta-analytically integrates results from three decades of human capital research in entrepreneurship. Based on 70 independent samples (N = 24,733), we found a significant but small relationship between human capital and success (r_c = .098). We examined theoretically derived moderators of this relationship referring to conceptualizations of human capital, to context, and to measurement of success. The relationship was higher for outcomes of human capital investments (knowledge/skills) than for human capital investments (education/experience), for human capital with high task-relatedness compared to low task-relatedness, for young businesses compared to old businesses, and for the dependent variable size compared to growth or profitability. Findings are relevant for practitioners (lenders, policy makers, educators) and for future research. Our findings show that future research should pursue moderator approaches to study the effects of human capital on success. Further, human capital is most important if it is task-related and if it consists of outcomes of human capital investments rather than human capital investments; this suggests that research should overcome a static view of human capital and should rather investigate the processes of learning, knowledge acquisition, and the transfer of knowledge to entrepreneurial tasks.     

The effect of social networks structure on innovation performance: A review and directions for research

Research on growth of innovations introduced to the market has gradually shifted its focus from aggregate-level diffusion to exploring how growth is influenced by a given social network structure's characteristics. In this paper, we critically review this branch of literature. We argue that the growth of an innovation in a social network is shaped by the network's structure. Borrowing from the field of industrial organization in economics, which defines itself as the study of the effect of market structure on market performance, we describe this new wave of research on growth of innovations as the effect of social network structure on innovation performance. Hence, social network structural characteristics should be incorporated into research on new product growth as well as into managerial marketing decisions such as targeting and new product seeding.We review how social network structure influences innovations' market performance. Specifically, we discuss (1) a networks' global characteristics, namely average degree, degree distribution, clustering, and degree assortativity; (2) dyadic characteristics, or the relationships between pairs of network members, namely tie strength and embeddedness; (3) intrinsic individual characteristics, namely opinion leadership and susceptibility; and (4) location-based individual characteristics, namely the degree centrality, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality of an individual network member.Overall, we find that growth is particularly effective in networks that demonstrate the “3 Cs”: cohesion (strong mutual influence among its members), connectedness (high number of ties), and conciseness (low redundancy). We identify gaps in current knowledge, discuss the implications on managerial decision making, and suggest topics for future research.     

Innovative opportunity pursuit, human capital and business ownership experience in an emerging region: evidence from Ghana

This study explores whether an entrepreneur??s ability to assemble and leverage human capital, particularly specific human capital relating to prior business ownership experience, is associated with seven types of product and work practices innovation in an emerging region, namely, Ghana. Logistic regression estimation revealed that portfolio entrepreneurs were more likely than novice entrepreneurs to report ??innovation tried??. Multinomial logistic regression analysis revealed that portfolio entrepreneurs were more likely than other entrepreneurs to report ??innovation tried and introduced??. If the goals of policy are to increase the ??quality?? of new business start-ups and maximize investment returns, there is a case to target assistance to portfolio entrepreneurs.     

How outside directors’ human and social capital create value for corporate international investments

Grounded in theories of resource dependence, vicarious and superstitious learning, information processing, and board group literature, this study examines how outside directors’ human and social capital affect the value of corporate foreign direct investments. We employ the event study approach to examine 1210 international investment cases of 836 US firms over a 13-year period. We find significant but distinct non-linear impacts of board members’ human capital (U-shaped effect) and social capital (inverted U-shaped effect). The quality of board capital is also influential, as demonstrated by the effect of directors’ prior foreign investment performance in addition to size and degree of internationalization of interlocked companies. The performance measures of both abnormal announcement returns and operating ROA yield similar results. Our findings highlight the importance of incorporating factors related to board human and social capital for a more comprehensive analysis of the contribution of outside directors to a firm’s international success.     

组织知识、跨部门协调与新产品创新绩效

组织的知识包括顾客知识、竞争者知识、技术知识等不同类型,不同类型的知识在新产品创新过程中起着不同的作用,并且会受到跨部门协调的影响。本研究基于长三角地区143家企业的问卷调查数据,实证考查了不同类型的组织知识是如何影响企业新产品创新绩效的,及跨部门协调在二者关系中的调解作用。结果表明（1）顾客知识对新产品市场表现有显著正向影响,但对新产品创新效率没有显著影响;（2）竞争者知识对新产品创新效率有显著正向影响,但对新产品市场表现没有显著影响;（3）技术知识对新产品市场表现和创新效率都有显著正向影响;（4）跨部门协调正向调解技术知识与创新绩效的关系。研究结果对于企业怎样提升新产品创新绩效具有重要的启示意义。     

Profiting from product innovation: The impact of legal, marketing, and technological capabilities in different environmental conditions

Although product innovation is a key tool for firms competing in the marketplace, innovating firms often fail to obtain economic returns from their product innovations. This study examines the moderating effects of legal, marketing, and technological capabilities on the relationship between product innovation and firm performance in different environmental conditions in order to identify how a firm can leverage these capabilities to profit from product innovation. Based on the data of 223 Chinese firms, this study finds that legal capability positively moderates the relationship between product innovation and firm performance, especially when competitive intensity is high; the moderating effect of marketing capability is positive, although it is weakened by market turbulence; and technological capability has a negative moderating effect, which becomes more significant as technological turbulence increases.     

Linking family-to-business enrichment and support to entrepreneurial success: Do female and male entrepreneurs experience different outcomes?

This study used survey data from 253 entrepreneurs who founded small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to examine how experiences in their family domain may benefit their experiences in their business domain. Specifically, it hypothesized that affective family-to-business enrichment, instrumental family-to-business enrichment, and family-to-business support would be positively related to entrepreneurial success and that each relationship would be more positive for female entrepreneurs than male entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurial success was assessed by economic measures (business performance, growth in employment) and measures of satisfaction with the entrepreneurial experience (satisfaction with status, satisfaction with employee relationships). Results offered substantial support for the notion that female entrepreneurs benefit from the linkages of family-to-business enrichment and support to entrepreneurial success, whereas they offered no support for the notion that male entrepreneurs benefit from these linkages. Female entrepreneurs may experience such benefits because of their relative lack of access to other resources such as human, social, and financial capital and because the female gender role encourages them to pursue work–family synergies. In contrast, male entrepreneurs may fail to experience such benefits because of the relative abundance of other resources available to them and because the male gender role discourages them from pursuing work–family synergies.     

Generating Business Referrals for SMEs: The Contingent Value of CEOs' Social Capital

We examine how small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) chief executive officers' (CEOs) social capital (as measured by strength of ties and structural holes) can help them bring business to their firms through the spread of positive referrals. Based on a sample of 408 French SME CEOs, we find a direct effect of social capital. Such effect is contingent on the CEO's personality, with social capital being most beneficial to CEOs with low levels of conscientiousness. CEOs' social ties facilitate the distortion of information, thereby leading personal contacts to give referrals to and endorse a focal CEO, even in the presence of negative signals, such as low conscientiousness.