مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The entrepreneur to some extent determines an enterprise’s fortune, a type of special, scarce, and irreplaceable social resource (Nunes, 2016). Prior research indicated that the entrepreneur also has an effect on technological innovation. Schumpeter (1934) considered entrepreneurship to be the motivating force of the “new combination,” and indicated that entrepreneur’s effect involves replacing the old mode of production with a new one, realizing the sustainable revolutionary change in the economic structure. Hambrick and Mason (1984) suggested the TMT (Top Management Team) theory, according to which the TMT’s demography will affect organizational performance, in terms of the age, term of office, education, and professional experience, and in turn, technological innovation. Rostow (2001) believed that a necessary condition for an increase in economic productivity is that entrepreneurs of one or several rapidly growing businesses invest profits in new productivity approaches, and that entrepreneurs are those who are prepared to innovate. Mao and Chen (2003) established three definitions of an entrepreneur, one of which is that an entrepreneur combines production factors or modes in a new way. The entrepreneur’s management activities, such as cultivating a management team, building organizational structure, and constructing an enterprise system, will affect cost control, quality advantage, flexibility, and technological innovation, which are sources of organizational efficiency (He and Li, 2005).

According to Jiao et al. (2010), an entrepreneur’s ability consists of conceptual ability (Zheng, 2006), guanxi ability (Park and Luo, 2001; He and Li, 2005), leadership (Williams, 1983; Li et al., 2003), and entrepreneurial ability (Covin and Slevin, 1989; Alvareza and Busenitzb, 2001). Jiao et al. (2014) believed that entrepreneurial alertness, uncertainty tolerance, and risk preference are significantly and positively correlated with technological innovation. Moreover, entrepreneurial alertness and interpersonal guanxi have a positive correlation with technologically innovative performance. In this study, entrepreneurial ability has been classified into four sub-indexes, which are entrepreneurial human capital, guanxi ability, social responsibility ability, and strategic leadership ability; we will examine their respective effects on enterprises’ technological innovation.

Furthermore, some scholars indicate that the relationship between entrepreneurial ability and technological innovation may differ with ownership systems; specifically, the ownership will affect the strength of the relationship. Entrepreneurs in listed companies with different ownerships exhibit significant differences. Xu et al. (2006) observed that Chinese state-owned companies face more managerial entrenchment risks; for state-owned and non-state-owned listed companies, significant differences exist in the agency problem. Further, Chen et al. (2010) research indicated that the underinvestment of non-stateowned companies in research is one of the largest challenges for technological innovation.