Abstract:

    In the era of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation", lots of employees separated from large companies, such as Tencent, Huawei and Alibaba, to establish businesses, and the phenomenon is common in China. With the rapid development of "internet+" and digitization, business model design has become a vital approach to the company′s sustainable advantage. Then, how do the characteristics and peculiarity of separated employee entrepreneurs affect the business model design of their enterprises? The solution of this issue can help entrepreneurs to design appropriate business models and achieve enterprises′ sustainable development.

    As one of the destinations of separated employees, employee entrepreneurship has aroused the organizational behavior and entrepreneurship in which the researchers are interested. However, after literature review, we find that there are few studies explaining the mechanism between entrepreneur and their enterprise′s business model design, even the business model. The business model design can be divided to two types, novelty-centered and efficiency-centered. Compared with other entrepreneurs, the special features of separated employee are their previous experiences and the corporate culture of the original company. Besides, the entrepreneurial traits can be generalized to entrepreneurial cognition and entrepreneurship. All of them can influence separated employee′s choice to business model design. As the main body of enterprise′s decision maker, it is often difficult to effectively interpret the mechanism of how decision-makers affect the business model design that exploring single variable′s influence to business model design. Meanwhile, there is a shortage of an in-depth discussion of the synergies between the multiple factors that more fully embody the overall characteristics of entrepreneurs and different business model design.

   Therefore, based on configuration mindset, by using the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method, and taking 25 cases of complicated human society established by Huawei′s separated employees as the sample, the study explores the path and mechanism of the influence of the four preceding conditions on business model design. Specifically, first of all, the study finds that there are four critical paths to realize the efficiency-centered business model design, and only one critical path to realize the novelty-centered business model design. The configuration of efficient-centered business model design can be classified into two types: the one lacking previous experiences and entrepreneurship and the other driven by entrepreneurship. Secondly, this study finds that compared with efficient-centered business model design, novelty business model design puts forward higher requirements for departing entrepreneurs. Thirdly, the separated entrepreneurs who lack previous experience and have weak entrepreneurship are more inclined to design efficient business model. Finally, based on knowledge inertia theory, it is proved that knowledge inertia plays an important role in business model design. On the basis of enriching the research on separated employee entrepreneurship, this study can provide reference for the separated employee who wonder to start up business about the business model design.

Key words:  venture company established by separated employees, business model design, configuration, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)