抄録
Results from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor indicate that Japan has an exceptionally low rate of business startups, further limiting quantitative research on Japanese entrepreneurship. Recently, however, the emergence of social media has fueled the rapid growth of web and mobile-related businesses that do not require much initial investment, resulting in a sizable number of startups even in Japan, despite the immature investment environment. Our research examined whether the determinants of entrepreneurial activity that have been identified in Western research apply to the Japanese setting. We targeted our survey to web-related startups operating in the Tokyo metropolitan area. By restricting the field of industry and the geographic area, we could control variations relating to environmental factors such as economic trends specific to some fields, locational factors, the labor market, and accessibility to investors and customers. We could thus examine more clearly how an entrepreneur’s personal characteristics, firm resources and strategies relate to business growth. We then predicted that an entrepreneur’s active performance, management team, business concept, product positioning and availability of external support would predict business growth. Business growth was measured with a performance index that asked owners to rate their business conditions over the last six months relative to their competitors and to their own past performance. As for management teams, we examined the number of founders and whether or not each management team had changed since its start. In the U.S., it is common for a CEO and a CTO to be the founders, but in Japan it is more common for the same person to serve as the CEO and CTO. Past research indicates that additions and changes to a management team facilitate business growth. Business concept refers to the degree to which one places importance on market size, market growth, and the newness of a product when identifying a business concept. Product positioning refers to the degree to which entrepreneurs emphasize quality, cost, niche, and having a totally new product when distinguishing one’s product from that of their competitors’. Product positioning was adapted from the Startup Genome Report (2011), a survey of WEB businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area. The availability of external support was measured in terms of investment from VCs and the number of mentors. Our sample consisted of 90 entrepreneurs running a web or a mobile-related businesses in the Tokyo metropolitan area. A web survey was administered from February to August 2012. Sixty percent were within two years and 70 percent were within three years of foundation. All but two respondents indicated their nationality as Japanese. Sixty-nine were novice entrepreneurs while 21 were serial entrepreneurs. Thirty-seven started the business alone. Eighty had been previously employed. We computed correlations and regression coefficients to examine the relationships between variables. As predicted, all four characteristics of active performance (i.e., active planning, active goal setting, active feedback seeking, network size and diversity) significantly predicted business growth. Business growth was also related to the management team: the larger the number of founders and the more frequent the changes in the team, the greater the business growth. Placing importance on market size, market growth, and newness of the product when identifying a business concept also predicted business growth. As for product positioning, having a totally new product was the only factor predicting business growth. External support, defined as the number of available mentors and investment from VCs in Series A, also predicted business growth.
