Gaining the Initiative: How do Lead Users Become Entrepreneurs?

Yin Miaomiao; Li Jiying

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20230111.401

Summary

This paper intends to deeply explore the internal process mechanism of “how lead users become entrepreneurs”. The study was conducted in the form of questionnaires, and the variables were assessed with validated scales. 295 useable samples were finally obtained, while the confirmatory factor analysis, correlation analysis, and hierarchical regression analysis were adopted to generate empirical results.The conclusions are as follows: First, users’ lead userness promotes entrepreneurial behaviors by stimulating their entrepreneurial intentions. Second, the higher the level of proactive personality, the more the lead userness can stimulate user entrepreneurial intentions. Third, the higher the user community centrality, the more likely the lead users’ entrepreneurial intentions can be transformed into entrepreneurial behaviors. Fourth, the higher the entrepreneurial self-efficacy, the more the promoting role of user community centrality in the transformation from lead users’ entrepreneurial intentions to entrepreneurial behaviors will be enhanced.The implications are as follows: First, lead users should develop and cultivate their proactive personality through participation in training. Second, lead users should take appropriate actions to occupy a central position in user communities. Third, lead users should improve their entrepreneurial self-efficacy, so as to promote entrepreneurial behaviors. Fourth, the government should not only encourage enterprises to actively construct online user communities, but also develop them into entrepreneurial incubation platforms.The future directions are that: Use longitudinal time user data to dynamically reveal the development and evolution process of user entrepreneurship; when studying the process mechanism of user entrepreneurship, bring into other personality traits of users such as trait competitiveness; incorporate more macro situational factors, such as entrepreneurial environment, government policies, and digital technology environment, into the research model, so as to explain the internal mechanism of the formation of user entrepreneurs in more detail.The contributions are that: First, this paper provides clues for decoding the internal mechanism of “innovation-driven entrepreneurship”. Second, from the perspective of individual differences, this paper clarifies the external conditions of users’ lead userness inducing their entrepreneurial intentions, which provides further evidence for the situational study of user entrepreneurial intentions. Third, by organically integrating the cognitive factors of lead users with the situational factors of user communities, this paper constructs an integrated model affecting the occurrence of user entrepreneurial behaviors, which provides a new theoretical perspective for further exploring the related issues of user entrepreneurship.