中国旅游与酒店创业研究回顾与展望--一个基于文献和实践调查的理论框架

自20世纪末大众旅游兴起，一批旅游与酒店创业企业开始出现，如今已发展成为当前旅游企业中的领跑者。在“大众创业万众创新”的政策出台与国内外旅游需求出现新变化的环境下，更加多元化的、庞大的旅游与酒店创业企业群体正在成长。与如此蓬勃发展的旅游创业实践相比，国内外旅游创业学术研究还没有深入展开。文章在对国内外旅游与酒店创业文献回顾的基础上，发现旅游创业研究在对创业理论中的几个基础维度，包括创业环境、创业主体、创业企业、创业过程和创业绩效以及这些维度间的关系方面需要进一步深入研究。进而，在一般创业理论框架基础上，提出了一个旅游与酒店创业研究的理论框架，并结合自2007年以来对70多家旅游与酒店企业实地调研所发现的管理实践问题，提出了一个研究问题清单，为后续学者拓展旅游与酒店创业研究提供借鉴参考。

Entrepreneurship Research in Chinese Tourism and Hospitality Industry:A Critical Review and an Agenda

Since the booming of mass tourism in late 1990’s, a large amount of entrepreneurial ventures in tourism and hospitality industry have emerged and grown rapidly in China. Many of them, like Ctrip, Home Inns, and U-tour, just name a few, have become the leading companies in their respective segments. An even larger amount of start-ups in tourism and hospitality industry have been established since 2010, when mobile internet technology and smart phone tided across mainland China. However, the significant Chinese entrepreneurship phenomena hasn’t been studied widely in the literatures, leaving a gap to fill to make the studies more relevant to the real world.
Since 2007, the authors and their colleagues have conducted extensive researches in tourism and hospitality entrepreneurial ventures in China. Totally, more than 90 founders and other 300 executives from 70 ventures have been interviewed at the field research stage. Based on the interactions between researchers and practioners, plus the comprehensive critical literature review and the classical entrepre-neurship research framework forwarded by Gartner, the authors proposed an agenda for future studies.
The main argument of the agenda is that the future tourism and hospitality entrepreneurship stud-ies should either deepen our understanding of each of the following dimensions, i.e., entrepreneurial en-vironment, entrepreneurial agents, entrepreneurial ventures, entrepreneurial process and entrepreneurial performance, or explore the relationships among those dimensions.
Specifically, the author put forward four research areas and respective research questions in each area. (1) Entrepreneurial environment and its effects on venturing activities. Major research questions include:what are the effects of institutional factors on tourism and hospitality entrepreneurship? What are the effects of demand evolution on entrepreneurship? What are the effects of market structure on en-trepreneurship? Is there any effect of entrepreneurship activities on entrepreneurial environment? If there are, what are some of the effects? (2) Entrepreneurial process and its effects on entrepreneurial performance. Major research questions include: what are the major differences among star-ups which focus on different chains along the value chain? How to describe/explain the entrepreneurial process through the theoretical lens of resource based view, dynamic capability, social capital and other frame-work? What are some of the innovative business models used by the start-ups? What are some of the in-novative management models practiced by the star-ups? How do the organizational capabilities evolve in the start-ups? (3) The founders, the teaming and their effects on entrepreneurial process. Major re-search questions include:what are the co-evolution relationships between team forming and capability ginning? What are the relationships between team structure and governing structure? How does the en-trepreneurial team learn and share knowledge and its effects on making decision? What are the effects of founder characteristics on entrepreneurial process including recognition of opportunity, acquirement and allocation of resources, and decision making? (4) The relationships between entrepreneurial perfor-mance and entrepreneurial environment, entrepreneurial agents and entrepreneurial ventures. For exam-ple, what are some of the motivations other than economic ones perused by the founders? What are the effects of non-profit motivation of founders on the performance of the start-ups?
In terms of methodology, the authors proposed that grounded theory building method and contextualized theory building method would be more helpful to explore the promising but relatively untouched research areas.