Abstract:     With the increasingly fierce competition in the market, the survival and development of start-up enterprises increasingly depend on their ability to launch new products, because new product development is the key means to diversify, update and even reshape enterprises to adapt to changing markets and technologies. However, the problems accompanying this process, such as unreasonable resource allocation, inaccurate market demand positioning, wrong decision-making, and lack of technology and knowledge, make start-up enterprises suffer heavy losses. The economic, social, physiological and psychological problems caused by the loss have hit the confidence of entrepreneurs and plunged them into a downturn. Existing research recognizes that prior experience is the most effective way to acquire technical knowledge, providing entrepreneurs with tacit knowledge and information, role familiarity and social network relationships, which can help start-up enterprises improve their new product development performance. In fact, the effect and influence path of individual cognition on performance output are often driven by multiple factors. The effect path of prior experience on new product development performance depends not only on the strategy of coping with losses, but also on the belief of overcoming losses. However, the related research is slightly weak. Based on conservation of resource theory and social cognition theory, we use 214 entrepreneurs′ questionnaire survey data for empirical analysis to explore the impact mechanism of prior experience on new product development performance. The results show that prior experience has a positive impact on new product development performance; resource-induced coping heuristic and innovative self-efficacy play a partial mediating role in the relationship between prior experience and new product development performance; prior experience indirectly affects the performance of new product development through the chain mediating effect of resource-induced coping heuristic and innovative self-efficacy. The theoretical implications for entrepreneurship research are as follows: (1) The paper constructs the influence mechanism model between prior experience and new product development performance, and elaborates the chain mediating effect of resource-induced coping heuristic and innovative self-efficacy, which makes up for the deficiency of existing research and opens up the "black box" between prior experience and new product development performance. (2) This study finds that resource-induced coping heuristic is a transformation mechanism between prior experience and new product development, which multiplies it into the field of entrepreneurship, and guides the focus of entrepreneurship research from "resource acquisition and integration" to "loss coping", providing a new perspective for entrepreneurship research. (3) This study expands the related research on innovative self-efficacy. A large number of studies have found that innovative self-efficacy is an important variable to explain entrepreneurial success, however, the source of innovative self-efficacy and how to cultivate it are still a difficult problem. This study provides an analytical thinking and perspective for this purpose. It is believed that resource-induced coping heuristic can reduce the level of uncertainty perception and give entrepreneurs confidence. It is an important source of innovative self-efficacy. The implications for entrepreneurial practice are as follows: (1) Prior experience is an important source of new product development performance. It is necessary for entrepreneurs to carefully examine the types and quality of their stored experience, as well as the difficulty and cost of obtaining experienced talents through different channels, and accumulate the required heterogeneous experience accordingly, merge and superimpose all kinds of prior experiences, exert their creative potential, and promote the success of new product development activities. (2) Resource-induced coping heuristic is the basis for successful strategy formulation. If an enterprise issues a series of instructions on the construction of resources such as acquisition, protection and development during its operation, the reserve of the resource pool will increase, thus contributing to the generation of different resource combinations with competitive advantages. Therefore, start-up enterprises should change their decision-making strategies appropriately and effectively, consciously acquire, protect and develop resources heuristically, stimulate innovative behavior through various resource combinations, and then improve the performance of new product development. (3) As a derivative of prior experience, innovative self-efficacy can help start-up enterprises to build confidence and persist in the dilemma of product development losses, and finally realize the improvement of new product development performance. Therefore, start-up enterprises should fully realize the role of innovative self-efficacy.

Key words: prior experience, resource-induced coping heuristic, innovative self-efficacy, new product development performance