创新驱动创业:新时期创新创业研究的核心学术构念

Innovation-driven Entrepreneurship:A Core Academic Construct of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research in the New Era

新一轮科技革命和产业变革的加速演进,呈现出创新驱动创业的新范式;面对新情境带来的挑战,更多的企业走上创新驱动创业之路。创新驱动创业成为一个独立的学术构念,然而现实主要还是将创新与创业割裂开来。创新驱动创业不是某种类型的创业或创新,是创新驱动发展国家战略在企业层面的发展模式和路径,也是构建新阶段创新创业研究理论框架的核心学术构念。本文对创新驱动创业构念进行界定,基于过程视角明确提出创新驱动创业具有触发、催化和聚变三个发展阶段,进一步提出创新驱动创业的跨层面、多主体和迭代性特征。在此基础上,探讨未来值得研究的相关问题。

In the context of a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation reshaping the global innovation landscape and economic structure, the deep integration of innovation and entrepreneurship activities presents a new paradigm of innovation-driven entrepreneurship. Faced with the challenges brought by the new context, the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China explicitly proposed the strategy of innovation-driven development for the first time, placing innovation-driven development at the core of national development. Innovation-driven entrepreneurship is the development mode and path of innovation-driven development national strategy at the enterprise level, as well as the core academic construct to build the theoretical framework of innovation and entrepreneurship research in the new era. From the theoretical origin, as early as 1912, Joseph Schumpeter proposed that entrepreneurs are the ones who implement innovation, integrating innovation and entrepreneurship. Later, scholars mainly focused on innovation or entrepreneurship separately, which gradually divided innovation and entrepreneurship into two relatively independent research fields. Some scholars have initially defined innovative entrepreneurship and innovation-driven entrepreneurship, but the relevant definitions mainly focused on the results of entrepreneurship and do not clarify the internal mechanism of innovation-driven entrepreneurship. However, entrepreneurship is a process. In order to reveal the essence of innovation-driven entrepreneurship deeply, we should not only focus on a certain part, but also define innovation-driven entrepreneurship systematically and comprehensively from the perspective of process, and pay attention to the internal mechanism of its process.Based on this, this paper firstly defines the construct of innovation-driven entrepreneurship, and holds that innovation-driven entrepreneurship refers to the process of realizing the opportunities of co-development and value creation by multiple actors together through the iterative interaction of multiple elements, triggered by technological innovation, institutional innovation and business model innovation. In innovation-driven entrepreneurship, the driving of innovation is the key factor to integrate innovation and entrepreneurship, which emphasizes the leading role of innovation and the nonlinear role of new paradigm. Secondly, based on the process view, this paper clearly proposes that innovation-driven entrepreneurship has development stages of triggering, catalyzing and fusion. The triggering stage is also known as the start-up stage. In this stage, technological innovation, institutional innovation or business model innovation function on a certain element, and then bring the possibility of entrepreneurial opportunity development. The catalyzing stage means the release of entrepreneurial opportunity potential, which is the core of the internal mechanism of innovation-driven entrepreneurship. In other words, one or more elements are further stimulated by a certain element that is acted upon by innovation and they interact iteratively, resulting in the increase of entrepreneurial opportunity rate, and number or scope. The fusion stage refers to the realization of entrepreneurial opportunities and the process of value creation under the aggregation and interaction of multiple actors, that is, the process in which the entrepreneurial actors interact with the multi-actor based on the opportunities formed in the catalyzing stage, and react on innovation, improve the system capability and realize the opportunity utilization, and finally bring high-quality output. Furthermore, this paper proposes that innovation-driven entrepreneurship has three characteristics, namely, the cross-level aspect, the multi-actor aspect and the aspect of iterative property. The cross-level aspect emphasizes that innovation-driven entrepreneurship is not limited to a single level of activities, but also involves the transitions from the individual to organizational level, and from single organization to multi-actor level. The multi-actor aspect emphasizes that innovation-driven entrepreneurship involves not only multiple firms from the same as well as different industries, but also other types of actors, such as governments, universities/research institutions, customers, and incubators. The multi-actors agglomeration is not disorderly or random, but follows the business logic of pursuing the potential value brought by opportunity development. Multiple actors co-create value and finally build an ecosystem. In terms of iterative property, from the perspective of process, while innovation-driven entrepreneurship brings high quality output, the role of entrepreneurship on innovation will further generates new opportunities, thereby promoting opportunity development. From the perspective of the development stages of innovation-driven entrepreneurship, the three stages of triggering, catalyzing and fusion are constantly iterative. From the behavioral perspective, multi-actors also embody iteration in the opportunity development behavior through innovation-driven development. Finally, this paper discusses the relevant topics worth studying in the future from four aspects, namely, the classification research, key elements research, process mechanism research and the research of indigenous theory of innovation-driven entrepreneurship.