A Research on the Consitituent Elements of Entrepreneurial Impetus in Innovation Cluster

As the best platform for the innovation development, the innovation cluster is not only an advanced model in clusters, but also the important foundation in making China an innovation-driven country. However, there are few innovation clusters in China at present, and they are still in the primary stage of cultivating overall. What’s worse, the cluster system has suffered from widespread problems with insufficient endogenous impetus and poor entrepreneurship environment. It’s particularly important to build a dynamic endogenous growth model in clusters, which promises entrepreneurship as an irreplaceable role. As theory and practice from both domestic and abroad proved, entrepreneurial activity has become the intrinsic motivation for the innovation cluster development, but the current research pays little attention to entrepreneurship, which stays a missing link in impact paths from intellectual capital to cluster development and even regional economic growth. Therefore, this research makes a try to apply the entrepreneurial impetus into the perspective of innovation clusters, in order to study the structure and generating mechanism of innovation impetus. It hopefully compensates for the weakness in related research, which is in line with the development trend of theory and practice.Based on reviewing both domestic and international theoretical achievement, this study develop an initial model taking into account entrepreneurial impetus in innovation clusters, in light of the current research on innovation cluster and entrepreneurship mechanism. Then we examine the related hypothesis by empirical methods, such as questionnaire survey and mathematical statistics. In that way, a structural equation model can be built so as to explore the constituent elements and internal mechanism of entrepreneurial impetus, as well as impact paths between innovation impetus and entrepreneurial performance. The results showed that the model is constituted by impetus factors affecting entrepreneurial activity on three levels. They are macro-level impetus factors (including entrepreneurial policy and entrepreneurial culture), middle-level impetus factors (including entrepreneurial intermediaries and entrepreneurial platforms), and entrepreneurial resources as the impetus factor at a micro level (including technical resources and information resources). These impetus factors have formed a support system of the entrepreneurial performance with the mutual coordination and cooperation. It’s seen that this research can not only contribute to research on the relationship between entrepreneurship and innovation clusters, but also provide theoretical reference and practice guidance for cluster development and even regional economic growth from the perspective of facilitating entrepreneurship.