创业孵化型平台企业制度创业与合法性保护——小米科技纵向案例研究

Institutional Entrepreneurship and Legitimacy Protection of Entrepreneurial Incubation Platform Enterprises:A Longitudinal Case Study of Xiaomi Technology

在创业孵化型平台企业为创业企业赋能过程中,如何保护自身合法性不受侵害是亟待解决的问题。对隶属于组织关系层面的分隔机制进行批判性回顾的基础上,依据制度创业相关理论对小米进行纵向案例研究,结果表明:创业孵化型平台企业在资源禀赋与相关预期目标的驱动下,依次采用资源策略、理论化策略和认知策略,逐步打造出创业生态系统文化、规制和规范,使创业企业感受到来自创业生态系统的模仿压力、强制压力和规范压力,进而约束其不端行为,最终促使创业孵化型平台企业合法性得到有效保护。结论有利于揭示创业孵化型平台企业通过制度创业保护合法性的相关机理,对于创业孵化型平台企业进行平台赋能具有实践指导价值。

How entrepreneurial incubation platform enterprises empower startups and protect their own legitimacy from being harmed by them are important issues to be addressed.According to the relevant literatures on the protection of organizational legitimacy,organizational legitimacy could be harmed because of the cognitive relevance brought by some cooperative relationships or relationships between organizations.Therefore,the literature advocates to solve the problem of organizational legitimacy protection from the perspective of decoupling.In the follow-up research,scholars conceptualize the theory of decoupling as a compartmentalizing mechanism,and believe that the compartmentalizing mechanism can be used to protect the legitimacy of the enterprise.However,the compartmentalizing mechanism can only be used as a short-term emergency governance mechanism instead of a long-term mechanism.First of all,the compartmentalizing mechanism advocates relationship separation,so it is difficult to restrain the behavior of the organizations with problems from the source;secondly,the compartmentalizing mechanism is not forward-looking and belongs to ex-post control,so it is difficult to recover some losses that have already occurred.The relevant viewpoints of institutional entrepreneurship from the perspective of new institutional theory can make up for the limitations of the compartmentalizing mechanism.Institutional entrepreneurship means that under the drive of certain factors,institutional entrepreneurs from a certain organizational field take the initiative to adopt institutional entrepreneurial strategies for institutional entrepreneurial objects,promote the existing institutional reform or form a new system so as to achieve the interests of institutional entrepreneurs.Among them,the organizational field is an important analysis unit connecting the organizational level and the social level,and it is not only suitable for the interactive network formed by competing organizations,but also helpful for the system formed by the focus organization and its important related actors.Given the background of this study,the entrepreneurial ecosystem formed by the focus organization of entrepreneurial incubation platform and its important related actors can be regarded as an organizational field in theory.Entrepreneurial incubation platform enterprises actively adopt a series of institutional entrepreneurial strategies to promote the existing institutional change or form a new system in the entrepreneurial ecosystem,and thus the misconduct of start-up enterprises is effectively restricted so as to protect the legitimacy of entrepreneurial incubation platform enterprises.This study adopts a longitudinal single-case study method,and selects Xiaomi Company as the research object.The results show that entrepreneurial incubation platform enterprises,driven by their own resource endowments and related expected goals,adopt the resource strategies,theorization strategies and cognitive strategies in turn,and gradually build entrepreneurial ecosystem culture and regulations.It brings the start-ups the imitation pressure,coercion pressure and normative pressure from the entrepreneurial ecosystem,and constantly restrains their misconduct.Finally,the legitimacy of entrepreneurial incubation platform enterprises can be effectively protected.The theoretical significance of this paper lies in that it provides a new explanatory logic for the protection of enterprise legitimacy on entrepreneurial incubation platform at the organizational field level,and changes the concept of enterprise legitimacy protection of entrepreneurial incubation platform from passive relationship separation to active source control,which makes up for the limitations of the compartmentalizing mechanism at the inter-organizational relationship level.From a practical point of view,this paper can provide a set of dynamic solutions for entrepreneurial incubation platform enterprises to solve the problem of legitimacy protection along the institutionalized path.Entrepreneurial incubation platform enterprises are suggested to make full use of their social resources and technical management resources to provide all-round support for entrepreneurial enterprises by defining products,cooperative research and development,process design,channel management,investment and financing management,supply chain management and other means.Moreover they should establish exclusive brands,e-commerce channels and internal testing systems,and design corresponding management systems,etc.to constrain any possible misconduct of start-ups.Finally the value of the good relationship with the partners should be stressed.