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Entrepreneurship and small business development in China
Jun Li
Introduction
This is an entrepreneurial age. As many as 460 million people worldwide were estimated to be either actively involved in trying to start a new venture or to be owner-managers of a new business in 2002 ([5] Bygrave, 2002). Surprisingly, China led the worldwide entrepreneurial trends. The GEM China Report ([16] Jiang et al. , 2003) suggested that the total entrepreneurship activity (TEA) of China reached 12.3, in comparison to America's 11.66, placing China in the ninth position out of 37 countries and regions under investigation in 2002. Given that current entrepreneurship research in China is still at its early stage, even the well-received GEM China Report could only examine entrepreneurial activity in China at macro-level, whilst failing to offer any revealing account at micro-level. This article aims to examine entrepreneurial activity at micro-level and to find out the common rules of entrepreneurial activity in China using the method of random sample and questionnaire survey on MBA students and the general public in China.
Literature review
The Timmons model
Generally speaking, entrepreneurship means the creation of new organisations ([10] Gartner, 1985). A broader meaning of entrepreneurship, however, now refers to the whole process of discovery, evaluation and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities ([24] Shane and Venkataraman, 2000), which consists of new venture creation and entrepreneurial behaviour in established organisations. This article focuses entrepreneurship on the creation of new venture.
[28] Timmons (1999) developed an interesting model of entrepreneurial process, which holds that new venture creation is a highly dynamic balance process between entrepreneurial opportunity, entrepreneurial team and resources, and that entrepreneurial opportunity, resources and entrepreneurial team are the key factors in the entrepreneurial process. He also suggested that as time goes on, the vagueness of opportunities, market uncertainties, risk of capital market, and external environmental factors would affect entrepreneurial process and make new venture creation full of risk and uncertainties. This results in an imbalance between entrepreneurial opportunity, entrepreneurial team and resources. At this point, entrepreneurial team plays a role of core decision-maker in adjusting the core activity to maintain the relative balance between entrepreneurial opportunity and resources. Opportunities recognition, resources assembling and entrepreneurial teams therefore constitute the crux of new venture creation, and entrepreneurship is...