China is the second largest economic entity in the world. It is well acknowledged that small businesses have made significant contributions to Chinese economic development in terms of employment generation, income generation and poverty reduction. Entrepreneurs are the key people who are driving small businesses forward, and the Chinese Government has invested substantially in science parks. However, our understanding of entrepreneurship activities, science parks and especially prior business experience and business performance in China remains under researched. Therefore, to fill this gap, this research explores entrepreneurs’ business performance of those who were on science parks against those whose businesses were off-park in Beijing China.
Human capital theory experience and the RBV provide the theoretical framework which were used to test the entrepreneur’s prior business ownership experience against the performance of the businesses in terms of innovation, exporting activity, employment growth, profitability and the usage of e-commerce. This research adopted a quantitative methodology to analyse a new data set gathered by the researcher. In the year of 2009, 462 valid questionnaires were received from the firms located on and off ZhongGuanCun Science Park (ZSP), and that represented a 12% response rate.
The results show that prior business ownership experiences and science park location have strong associations with business performances. In particular, firstly habitual entrepreneurs are more likely than novice entrepreneurs to be innovators, and in general to have a better business performance; secondly, business located on science parks generally performed better than off-park businesses and lastly, interestingly, there is no clear evidence showing that habitual entrepreneurs have better usage of e-commerce than novice entrepreneurs. According to these key research findings, implications are elucidated for Chinese practitioners and policy makers
