Emergence of China's Entrepreneurship in the Digital Age: A Grounded Theory Analysis Based on Multiple Cases

Abstract

Entrepreneurship has always been a key production factor in sustainable innovation and development of enterprises. However, individual entrepreneurship in the industrial economy era no longer satisfies the digital-age innovation demands of “being quick, stable and lasting,” revealing that the characteristics of digital-age entrepreneurship are crucial to understanding sources of continuous innovation. Therefore, this paper adopts grounded theory and qualitative research on four companies, and finds that digital innovation uncertainty is the key to the emergence of entrepreneurship, the social attributes of digital technology. The adaption of enterprise organizational structure triggers the transmission of entrepreneurship from the individual level to the organizational level, thus forming an ethics system that is dependent on entrepreneurs’ behavioral process and that widely exists in organization groups. Organizational entrepreneurship consists of market adaptation, value orientation, self employment and community sense. The research is helpful in clarifying the relationship between digital technology and entrepreneurship, in enriching the connotation of digital-age entrepreneurship, helping managers to inspire potential entrepreneurship of organization members, and promoting continuous innovation of enterprises.

Keywords

digital age, organizational entrepreneurship, connotation evolution, emergence principle

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