Empirical Study on the Five-dimensional Influencing Factors of
Entrepreneurial Performance
Xin Lan
Business Institute, China West Normal University, Nanchong, China
(Lancy186@163.com)
Abstract – Entrepreneurial is the current hot issues, but
the entrepreneurial success rates are not high.
Entrepreneurial performance relats to survival or extinction
of the enterprises, researching the factors that influence
entrepreneurial performance is the key points to capture
success. In this study, we make use of theoretical analysis and
empirical research to explore five-dimensional factors that
affect entrepreneurial performance, which consists of capital
dimension，innovative dimension, team dimension, market
dimension and environmental dimension. Then through
regression analysis , we sorted out the stepwise regression
model coefficients and test values, to establish the regression
equation,We analyzed the influence of 5-dimensional factors
to entrepreneurial performance. The study is conducive to
entrepreneurial activities to overcome difficulties and to
entrepreneurial success. 
Keywords - entrepreneurial ， entrepreneurial
performance ， five-dimensional factors ， empirical
research
I. INTRODUCTION
Entrepreneurship can not only cultivate the national
innovative capability, but also to improve national
productivity and employment rates and speed up the
construction pace of knowledge-based economy strategy.
It is a favorable way to alleviate the current difficult of
employment. In this context, our many business support
policies were introduced, in particular, to encourage and
support college students entrepreneurial. However, the
participation and success rates of college student start
remain low. As a result, to improve the business
performance of our college business should be a subject
worthy of attention in entrepreneurial management
discipline study. The starting point of this study is to
explore the real key dimensions of factors impact on
business performance, but the ultimate goal is to improve
business performance and the rate of business success.
So, what are the key factors currently affecting
business performance, how to make business out of the
woods effectively. In this study, we have searched much
literatures, we found many literatures only remained in the
relatively study on macro education and the management
level to put forward some frameworks and models, few
articles from the entrepreneur’s perspective to analysis the
reality of current entrepreneurial difficulties, use
quantitative analysis to reflect the impact dimensions of

Project：It’s a financial support project of China West Normal
University“ empirical research on marketing plight and strategies of the
new ventures”(No.11A016)
the entrepreneurial performance, and make use of the
relevant strategies to promote entrepreneurship success[1]
II. THEORETICAL BASIS AND RESERRCH
HYPOTHESIS
Definition of entrepreneurship through a different
interpretation, Shane (2000) illustrates how entrepreneurs
identify and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities in new
ventures based on their prior, and then produce a variety of
results.[2].Yu Yi-hong found that entrepreneurship is a
complex process that discovering and capturing
opportunities and creating new products and services, and
realize their potential value process. Bemadin (Bemadin,
1995) believed that performance should be defined as the
results of work, which reflected the achievement and
results gained by people in their work.[3]. Nowadays,
operating profit created by young entrepreneurs is mainly
reflected in their profit or loss. The study on the
achievement of these companies was based on their
performance in recent 2 years.
A. Capital Dimension
Performance
and
Eentrepreneurship
The three elements of Timmons (Timmons, 2004)
Model tell us that, business opportunity, entrepreneurial
team and entrepreneurial resource can promote the
development of entrepreneurship during their consistently
matching and balancing with each other. These elements
drive each other in different development stages of the
company while changing their relation from imbalance to
balance. The capital factor in entrepreneurship is the most
important dimension in resource elements of Timmons
Model; it appears that difficulties faced in entrepreneurship
are often the problem of capital. Capital deficiency will
make it very difficult to transform innovation into real
productivity or to carry out business operation.[4] Some
youths really have very good entrepreneurial plans, but
they haven’t starting money, as a result, their plans can’t be
put into practice; or even they start their entrepreneurial
activities, the capital problem will also impact operating
profit. At present, all levels of governments are widely
introducing various kinds of supporting policies, such as
patent application grant, innovation fund for medium or
small-sized enterprises, industry-specific subsidies,
business subsidies to college graduates, entrepreneurship
competition prize. Therefore, we proposed the following
assumptions:
H1: Lacking of starting money is the first difficulty in
developing entrepreneurial activities; the more starting
money is the better entrepreneurship performance will be.
H2: In the operation of the venture company, good
capital chain will promote the company to develop in a
healthy manner; the circulating fund has a significant
impact on entrepreneurship performance.
H3: Smooth financing channel will speed up the
development of the venture company, and promote the
company to achieve better entrepreneurship performance.
H4: Government’s support toward entrepreneurial
activities through offering innovation fund, business
subsidies, etc. will help improve entrepreneurship
performance, thus government support has a positive
impact on entrepreneurship performance.
B. Innovation
Performance
Dimension
and
Entrepreneurship
Joseph Alois Schumpeter pointed out in his Theory of
Economic Development, the economic development was
obtained from innovation, while the subject of innovation
is entrepreneurs[5]. Drucker thought that innovation was a
special tool featuring entrepreneurship, which gave
resources a new capacity to make fortune. Drucker even
thought that one person could not be called an entrepreneur
if he did not have a venture company [6]. From the above,
we draw a conclusion that there is a close relation between
innovation and entrepreneurship.
Paul A. Samuelson found that in the annual growth rate
per capita of 1.8%, about 1.5% was from technology
innovation after studying on the economic growth in the
USA from 1990 to 1996[7]. What is worthy to be mentioned
is: innovation not only refers to invention, it also means
real development of invention which is called
entrepreneurship. Compared with entrepreneurship,
invention is relatively simple and easy to do, and
difficulties often appear in real development of invention.
Technology innovation will influence the research and
development and production of new products, while only
good quality products have market potential, which may
further influence the entrepreneurship performance.
Therefore, we put forward the following assumptions:
H5: Technology innovation can promote the research
and development and production of new products, which
will further significantly influence entrepreneurship
performance.
Cheng Chun (2010) thought that, development
difficulties of venture companies in our country were
closely related to the insufficient of innovative motivation,
unreasonable internal and external incentive systems[8].
Zhou Mi (2009) pointed out that the key to solve the
difficult situation in transformation from technology
imitation to independent innovation was to strengthen the
research and development and supply of generic
technology[9].The abovementioned studies were done from
the point of view of how to improve innovation, and all of
them placed much emphasis on independent innovation,
but, nowadays, college graduates or young entrepreneurs
are facing the difficulty of transforming technology into
real productivity, although they have some technology
innovations, they fail to put these technology innovations
into real operation, which as a result leads to the low
pioneering success rate. According to the above analysis,
we proposed several assumptions for testing:
H6: Successful transformation of innovation into real
operation has a positive impact on entrepreneurship
performance.
Business model is a substantial factor including
positioning and channels for a company to provide its
products and services to the customers and the company’s
operation structure which enable the company to achieve
its business goals. The first innovation of a company is the
innovation of its business model, which is the foundation
of development and profit. Therefore, I put forward the
following assumption that:
H7: The innovative business model has a significant
impact on entrepreneurship performance.
C. Cooperation Team Member Dimension and
Entrepreneurship Performance
Factors such as the quality, experience and expertise
of the entrepreneur and his team members will influence
the success of entrepreneurship. According to our
investigation and survey, entrepreneurial team members’
experience in business management as well as their
relevant management knowledge impact greatly on
entrepreneurship performance. Therefore, in this paper, we
proposed the following assumptions:
H8: Practical experience in business operation has a
positive impact on entrepreneurship performance.
H9: Expertise has a positive impact on
entrepreneurship performance.
H10: Cooperation of team members has a positive
impact on entrepreneurship performance.
D.Market Dimension and Eentrepreneurship Performance
The supply-and-demand difficulty existing in the
entrepreneur market seriously restricts the combination
between entrepreneurs and technology innovation capital,
and weakens the function of entrepreneurs’ innovation and
innovative vigor of their companies. Market structure and
competition situation the entrepreneurs faced with are
important factors which impact the success of
entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs must adopt proper
competition strategies in such market structure, if fail to
conduct market positioning correctly or adopt the wrong
marketing mix strategies, their companies may stop
developing or even become unable to exist. We proposed
assumptions for testing as follows:
H11: Wrong or unclear target market strategy will be
a disadvantage to the success of entrepreneurship, correct
target market strategy has a positive impact on
entrepreneurship performance.
H12: Products/services meeting market demands
significantly have a positive impact on entrepreneurship
performance.
H13: Competitive price has a positive impact on
entrepreneurship performance.
H14: Reasonable marketing strategies have a positive
impact on entrepreneurship performance.
E.Environment Dimension and Entrepreneurship
Performance
Entrepreneurial environment refers to the aggregate
of a series of concepts which significantly promote the
success of entrepreneurship. Gu Shengzu et al. (2008)
conducted a comprehensive analysis on the current
situation of
Chinese
supporting policies
on
entrepreneurship and their weaknesses based on the
investigation to the theory framework of the relative
policies in other countries, and proposed a system to
improve such polices in China from five aspects
respectively entrepreneurship financing, entrepreneurship
services, entrepreneurship cluster, entrepreneurship
education and entrepreneurship culture [10]. Here we
proposed two assumptions for testing as follows:
H15: The effective support from the government and
social organization will have a significantly positive
impact on entrepreneurship performance.
H16: Support from colleges and families have a
significant impact on entrepreneurship performance.
After retrieving, consulting and studying related literature,
in order to make the results of the study more general, we
took various entrepreneurial projects into consideration in
our questionnaire to make it suited to the Pioneer Park for
Chinese college students (Chengdu) and the Liaison
student entrepreneurial base of the institutions including
Youth (College Student) Pioneer Park of Chengdu
Hi-Tech Zone, Technology Park of University of
Electronic Science and Technology of China, Sichuan
Normal University Chengdu College, Chengdu University
of Information Technology, Sichuan University Jincheng
College, University of Electronic Science and Technology
of China Chengdu College, Chengdu Vocational &
Technical College, Sichuan Top Vocational Institute of
Information Technology College, and the 376 enterprises
and project teams in the Chengdu Hi-Tech Zone
Innovation Center. The targets of this investigation are all
business or project leaders who are developing
entrepreneurial activities, and all of them are able to
answer the questions in the questionnaire. In this
investigation, we distributed 900 questionnaires in total,
among which 756 were taken back, that is, the recovery
rate of it is 84%; and 698 were valid questionnaires, the
validity rate is 92%. The questionnaires were distributed
reasonably in those companies, and the industries selected
are also representative industries, which including 5 ones,
for example, information technology, where college
graduates are more willing to do business in these fields.
IV. RESULT OF THE STUDY
III. RESEARCH DEVISING
A. Reliability Test of Samples
A. Definition and Measurement of Variable
The scope of this analysis is mainly those
entrepreneurial activities of entrepreneurs who developed
their entrepreneurial activities at their first time
independently, such kind of entrepreneurial activities do
not have their initial capital accumulation, and their capital
resources are mainly from self-raised funds or from
financing activities. The explained variable in this analysis
is the entrepreneurship performance, which is mainly
reflected in the profit or loss situation of venture
companies, the situation of companies we investigated and
surveyed in this research all reflects their performance of
the last 2 years.
In this research, we used Likert Scales in the
measurement
of
the
influencing
factors
of
entrepreneurship performance viewing from the angle of
entrepreneurs. We designed a 7-grade scale (1=completely
don’t agree, 4=remain neutral, 7=fully agree), and the
entrepreneurs investigated should score carefully
according to their degree of acceptance to the questions.
B.Sample Selection and Data Collection of the Formal
Questionnaire
In this study, we made descriptive statistics, and
reliability and validity tests of the collected sample data.
And the result of reliability analysis shows that the
“Cro-banch a” value of capital dimension, market
dimension, innovation dimension, environment dimension
and cooperation team member dimension are 0.931, 0.969,
0.943, 0.952 and 0.674 respectively. According to the
suggestion of Churchilli, the coefficient of the items is
more reliable when the value of “Cro-banch a” is greater
than 0.7.
B. Exploratory Factor Analysis
In this study, in order to test the validity of the
assumption of the five influencing factors of the
achievement of entrepreneurial activities, we made an
exploratory factor analysis on the 16 questions in the
questionnaire. In the factor analysis, we adopted a
principle component analysis method, and varimax in
rotation. We also used SPSS17.0 in Bartlett sphericity test
and KMO measurement, the observation of the statistic
product of Bartlett test of sphericity is 1633.350, and the
corresponding probability is close to 0. When significance
level “a” is 0.05, due to the probability “p” is less than the
significance level “a”, as a result, the null hypothesis of
Bartlett test of sphericity is rejected, and it can be
considered that there is a significant difference between
correlation matrix and unit matrix. Then let’s observe the
KMO value, if it is greater than 0.7, it can be said that this
project has passed factor analysis and it conforms to the
standard of KMO measurement which is often used in
factor analysis as proposed by Kaiser, therefore, we can
explore the key influencing factors of entrepreneurship
success by using factor analysis method.
Questions in the questionnaire are systematically
subordinate to several factors at the same time, the factor
analysis indicates that capital dimension questions
arefour-factor structure, and the factor loading of them are
between 0.735 and 0.915; the innovation dimension
questions are three-factor structure, the factor loading of
them are between 0.816 and 0.917; the cooperation team
member dimension questions are three-factor structure, the
market dimension questions are four-factor structure, the
factor loading of them are between 0.661 and 0.891; the
environment dimension questions are two-factor structure,
the factor loading of them are between 0.722 and 0.746, the
factor loading of them are between 0.729 and 0.877. As
there is no cross loading, see from the loading coefficient
of each factor in the corresponding dimension, all the
loading are very large, which shows that the factors have a
good convergence, and the questions are reasonable, and
the dimensions established based on assumption also
conform to the study.
C. Multiple Regression Analysis
The study also tested the abovementioned assumptions
by using regression analysis model, made an analysis on
the impact of capital dimension, innovation dimension,
cooperation team member dimension, market dimension
and environment dimension on the entrepreneurship
performance, and then formed Table 1 as follows of Model
1, Model 2, Model 3, Model 4 and Model 5
TABLE I，Verification results on the five-dimension supporting system model of entrepreneurship performance
Variables
H1: Enough capital has been raised
H2: Smooth financing channel
H3: Sufficient circulating fund
H4: Received support from the government funding
Model 1
Model 2
0.489＊＊＊ 0.989＊＊＊
0.943＊＊＊ 0.701＊＊＊
4.475＊＊＊
0.840＊＊
- 0.420
-3.979＊＊＊
H5: Technology innovation and product research and
development
H6: Conversion of entrepreneurship achievement
H7: Innovative business model
H8: Have experience in business operation
H9: Have expertise
H10: Cooperation of team members
H11: Degree of clearance of target market position
H12: Degree of the products meeting the market demand
H13: Competitive price
H14: Degree of using sales promotion strategies
Model 3
Model 4
1.405＊＊＊
0.237＊＊＊
5.543＊＊＊
-4.873
-.183
-.653
6.099＊＊＊ 4.476＊＊＊
-1.518＊＊＊ -1.792＊＊＊
3.058＊＊＊
0.444
0.102
0.096＊＊＊
1.086＊＊＊
0.026＊＊＊
0.014＊＊
H15: Degree of support from the government and social
organizations
H16: Degree of support from colleges and families
F
81.196
142.009
119.599
63379.427
R2
0.391
0.661
0.702
0.998
Note: ＊ means P<0.1, ＊＊ means P<0.05, ＊＊＊ means P<0.01 (two-tailed)
In Model 1, the accessibility of initial capital
(β=0.489, P<0.01), financing channel (β=0.943, P<0.01),
circulating fund (β=0.840, P<0.05) have a significant
impact on entrepreneurship performance, which conforms
to assumptions H1-H3. However, assumption H4 of
whether received government funding has no significant
correlation with entrepreneurship performance and it is not
verified, which shows that the direct funding of
government did not help to improve the entrepreneurship
performance.
In Model 2, the assumption H6 of conversion of
entrepreneurship achievement (β=6.099, P<0.01) will
impact the entrepreneurship performance, assumption H7
of having innovative business model (β=-1.518, P<0.01)
will also impact the profitability of the companies, and it is
verified. But assumption H5 of technology innovation and
Model 5
1.187＊＊＊
0.341＊＊＊
246.445
0.489
product research and development has no significant
correlation with entrepreneurship performance, which
shows the pressure of technology research and
development of these companies are very big.
In Model 3, having experience in business operation
(β=3.058, P<0.01) has a significant impact on
entrepreneurship performance, then the assumption H8 is
verified. But surprisingly, the relation between expertise
and entrepreneurship performance is relatively weak, and
the cooperation of team members has no significant
correlation with entrepreneurship performance, that is, the
assumptions H9 and H10 are not verified.
In Model 4, the degree of clearance of target market
position (β=-0.096, P<0.01) promotes the venture
companies to develop in a healthy manner, if they don’t
have a clear idea about the target market they may fall into
difficulties, thus the assumption H11 is verified. The
degree of the products /services meeting the market
demand has a significant impact on entrepreneurship
performance, which shows that the assumption H12 is
verified. Competitive price and efficient sales promotion
strategies have a significant impact on entrepreneurship
performance; therefore, assumptions H13 and H14 are
verified.
In Model 5, if receiving efficient support from the
government and social organization (β=-0.341, P<0.01),
then the entrepreneurship performance of the company will
improve significantly, thus the assumption H15 is verified.
The efficient support from colleges and families (β=-1.187,
P<0.01) has a significant impact on entrepreneurship
performance, and the assumption H16 is verified.
V. CONCLUSION
This study is made from the angle of entrepreneurs,
starting from the influencing factors of entrepreneurship
performance, and based on the features of real difficulties
appear in the entrepreneurial activities, with combination
with results of extensive research literature. It conducted
an empirical research on the structure of the five
dimensions which influence the entrepreneurship
performance, through five-dimension supporting system
model building, exploratory factor analysis and regression
analysis, we concluded that five-dimension influencing
factors consisting of capital dimension, innovation
dimension, cooperation team member dimension, market
dimension and environment dimension. All the
abovementioned five dimensions have factors successfully
verified, in this analysis; we named all the verified factors
in each dimension and obtained a supporting system model
of entrepreneurship performance and its key factors, as
shown in Figure 1.
Model 2: Verified
assumptions H6 and H7 of
innovation dimension
Named as:
Achievement
transformation support
Model 3: Verified
assumptions H8 of
cooperation team
member dimension
Named as: Enterprise
practice support
Model 1: Verified
assumptions H1-H3 of
capital dimension
Named as: Financing
channel support
Model 4：Verified
assumptions H11-H14 of
market dimension
Named as: Marketing
support
Model 5: Verified assumptions H15-H16 of
environment dimension
Named as: External environment support
Fig. 1. The key factors from the five-dimension model of
entrepreneurship performance
In a word, five-dimension supporting system model of
entrepreneurship performance from perspective of
entrepreneurs is a mirror, by using such model to analyze
the influencing factors of entrepreneurship performance
during certain period and in a certain place, we can
conclude the structure of government support system
during that period and in that place. The key factors costing
much effort play an instructive role on enhancing
pioneering success rate.
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