关键词: 冗余资源, 资源拼凑, 创业机会识别, 倒U型

Abstract:    The focus of entrepreneurial research is to answer "how, by whom, and with what effects opportunities to create future goods and services are discovered, evaluated, and exploited". Identifying the business opportunity is one of the most important abilities of a successful entrepreneur. The resource-based view shows that corporate resources drive value creation by developing competitive advantage. However, the possession of resources does not guarantee the development of competitive advantage or value creation. In order to achieve value creation, enterprises must integrate and use resources.
    Slack resources are a possible source of enterprise innovation, including the company′s available resources beyond business demands, funding guidelines or target requirements, which both relieve resource demands of enterprises and provide new opportunities for enterprise construction. On the one hand, slack resources cushion corporate innovation or change, and these resources help companies mitigate internal conflicts and adapt to internal pressures. On the other hand, this "buffer" that can enhance the competitiveness of enterprises and become a source of funding for innovation activities may also be seen as a "stumble" for corporate innovation activities. It can be seen that slack resource is a double-edged sword. Entrepreneurs reorganize and creatively use existing resources, and share and mobilize practical knowledge in a way that challenges general theoretical methods. These theoretical methods indicate how entrepreneurs use resources to discover new business opportunities.
    Based on this, this paper analyzes the impact of slack resources on entrepreneurial opportunity identification and the non-linear relationship between slack resources and resources bricolage from the perspective of resource orchestration, and uses empirical data from China in an empirical analysis. This paper is an important extension of the resource orchestration theory and the resource bricolage theory. It helps to break the research gap in the resource bricolage that pay too much attention to the resource constrain, and enhances the universality of resource bricolage (it is also suitable for startups with some resources). At the same time, this paper also helps to interpret the types of enterprise identification resources from the perspective of resource orchestration. Enterprises can integrate and employ resources, and identify business opportunities.
     This survey lasted 4 months from March to July in 2018. We collected data in two ways from research companies and projects and 201 valid questionnaires are returned. In order to ensure the effectiveness of the measurement tools, this paper tries to adopt existing mature scales and make appropriate adjustments according to the research purpose and situation to improve the validity of concept and content in the research. The empirical results show that both absorbed and unabsorbed slack resources can help enterprises identify entrepreneurial opportunities. As for unabsorbed slack resource, it has a positive impact on resources bricolage. But when more than one certain node is involved, unabsorbed slack resource has a negative impact on resource bricolage. Resource bricolage has a positive role on entrepreneurial opportunity identification.
    This paper has obtained three important theoretical results. First, the absorbed slack resource is related to the opportunity identification, because idle resources that can be developed are an advantage for companies. Unabsorbed slack resources is easier to redeploy elsewhere, and the flexibility could bring greater management discretion, which is valuable to the opportunity identification process of organizations. Second, the accumulation of absorbed slack resource tends to increase the operating costs of enterprises and crowd out production resources, because the potential to activate fixed assets requires constant trial and error, which undoubtedly increases the cost of failure. Therefore, as the cumulative absorbed slack resource has increased, it will bring a series of negative effects to the enterprise′s resource bricolage. Although unabsorbed slack resources can make companies more flexible and increase the ability of resource bricolage, over unabsorbed slack resources allows business managers to meet the status and over-optimism, thus these managers could give up the pursuit of new opportunities through resource bricolage. Third, new companies need to try new solutions to restruct and reconfigure resources and address new threats and opportunities. By combining and reusing resources to solve new problems and opportunities, entrepreneurs use their experience to develop new products or services and capture new opportunities in management. The resource bricolage focuses on the social construction nature of the new enterprise resource environment, and explains why some entrepreneurs can achieve "out of nothing" to achieve opportunities.
     This paper has also some management implications. First, companies need to be dexterous to enhance the ingeniousness configuration of slack resources. Enterprises should stimulate the potential of slack resources while fully accepting slack resources, so as to obtain solutions to find problems. By ensuring that enterprises have a considerable pool of resources, thereby weakening the resource constraints encountered in the development process and mobilizing the resource capacity to identify entrepreneurial opportunities. Second, enterprises need to rely on their powerful resource bricolage capability to make use of the resource allocation effect of flexible acquisition, configuration and utilization. By understanding resource elements and building resource allocation capabilities with unique characteristics, enterprises can seize some key elements that enable breakthrough and promote enterprises′ productions, model, service innovation, and incite resource advantages hidden in the organization, and generate endogenous thrust to identify opportunities.
    Needless to say, this paper has inevitably some limitations. First, the sample of the study is insufficient. We finally collected 209 valid questionnaires for hypothesis verification. In particular, in the study of the curve relationship between absorbed slack resource and resource bricolage, the inverted U-type relationship is not found. However, according to Figure 2, it can be seen that the increase of absorbed slack resource, the effect of resource bricolage is weakened. In the future, the sample size can be increased for research. Second, the choice of dimensions of resource bricolage is also insufficient. This paper selects the one-dimensional method proposed by Senyard et al. for model verification. Multi-dimensional resource bricolage measurement methods can improve type selection of resource bricolage methods, and obtain the advantages and disadvantages of the selection results through comparisons. Future research can use multi-dimensional measurement methods.

Key words:  slack resource, resources bricolage, entrepreneurial opportunity identification, inverted U-shaped