What Do Chinese Entrepreneurs Think about Entrepreneurship: A Case Study of Popular Essays on Zhisland

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly essential in this current era of the knowledge economy. It contributes to the innovation of products and services as well as improved processes. In the long-run, it can also improve the sustainability of the economy by depicting better efficiency and social goals. To stimulate entrepreneurship, it is essential to investigate the thinking behind entrepreneurship or what entrepreneurs think about entrepreneurship. Such investigations should encompass the mental images of entrepreneurs. In this regard, content analysis, based on the popular Zhisland essays, may be applied to elicit opinions from Chinese entrepreneurs about activities, critical factors and intended outcomes within the ambit of entrepreneurship. In this study, 634 concepts are first coded and categorized into 20 second-level themes and six first-level themes. The six first-level themes are competing strategy, human resource management, management and leadership, marketing and sale, research and development, and risk management. Furthermore, among the 20 second-level themes, leadership, self-improvement, and the risk of business cycle attract the highest attention, each of which accounts for around 10% of the coded concepts. Finally, a causal loop diagram is depicted to synthesize the coding results. This study also underscores three essential activities of entrepreneurship, which entail building and maintaining competing advantage, improving user experience, and risk management. Entrepreneurs need to balance investments in those activities according to the change in environment and customers’ needs.

Intrapreneurial Fit and Misfit: Enterprising Behavior, Preferred Organizational and Open Innovation Culture

“…Authors [8] reviewed current research and found that 'the concept of entrepreneurship has evolved from launching a new business to any entrepreneurial activities that involve a new way to operate a business or NGO, or an existing organization'. The need for intrapreneurial traits and behaviors extends to many areas of organizations and has become a strategic issue for ensuring the performance of organizations [9] as employees need to adopt intrapreneurial roles, such as innovators and differentiators [10].…”

Antifragile Philosophy in R&D Projects: Applying Q Methodology and the Possibility of Open Innovation

“…Alternatively, Q-Methodology can also be integrated in the value chain of other methodologies. Some applicable cases would include generating the input set for system dynamics analysis such as the those performed in entrepreneurship assessment [46] or the complementation of strictly indicator-based works [47,48]. For the later type of research, the opinion of policy makers and R&D agents would allow visualizing not only what is strictly bound to indicators but also the feeling of the open innovation community.…”

Developing a System Dynamic Model for Product Life Cycle Management of Generic Pharmaceutical Products: Its Relation with Open Innovation

“…As various actors are involved in the PLM system over time [39][40][41], the system dynamic model of PLM includes all needed characteristics (multi-scales, capacity for showing different relationships and feedbacks, strategic planning) [34,35] to utilize various methods towards providing aspects of product lifecycle management [77]. Product lifecycle management systems allow firms to integrate all of the business processes and information related to products portfolio at every managerial and technical organizational level [77,78].…”

“…Many studies used the system dynamic modeling to show the different relationships between variables. It has been used to model the different relationships and feedback between the variables in a specific system over time [34] and to analyze the system behavior such as a company, guiding policymakers to manage companies better [35]. The SD approach has been widely used in recent years to solve problems in different healthcare fields, such as supply chain management, healthcare policy, technology and information, aging, and population [36].…”