Effects of Personal and Environmental Characteristics on Immigrant Entrepreneurial Motivation, Strategies and Outcomes: Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Perspective

Abstract

<p>The recent structural changes in international migration and immigrant entrepreneurship (IE) call for new knowledge discoveries in the field. This research adopted a pragmatic paradigm to investigate the IE phenomenon through six sub-projects, each addressing one of six research objectives.</p> <p>Two systematic literature reviews (SLRs) examined IE motivation (IEM) and IE strategies (IES). The first investigated the application of eight dimensions of push-pull factors to IEM. Of these, five were individual dimensions: demographic, personal circumstances; personal values and other personality characteristics; business ideas and opportunities; and self-efficacy. The remaining three were environmental—host- and home-country and ethnic community—and were together conceptualized as the immigrant entrepreneurial ecosystem (IEE) for the subsequent sub-projects. Findings from the IEM study revealed that having professional skills and the desire to start businesses is the most potent pull factor, followed by business experience, while lack of access to labor markets and discrimination are critical motivation push factors. The second SLR categorized IES into 10 groups: location, break-out, social network, embeddedness, transnational/international, informal, ethnic enclave, family business, home business, and female entrepreneurship. These were further classified into survivalist, growth-oriented and capital accumulation strategies.</p> <p>Drawing on evidence that immigrant entrepreneurs are affected by host and home countries, the research developed a dual entrepreneurial ecosystem (DEE) analytical framework in sub-project three to guide the following two case studies. The first case study tested the effects of home-country EE domains (funding, market, human capital, social-culture, infrastructure and business support, and government policies) on eight Chinese entrepreneurs in Australia and New Zealand and found that all home-country ecosystem domains apply to the IE phenomenon. The second case study examined co-effects of DEE domains on twelve immigrant entrepreneurs who were operating through e-platforms. The results revealed that elements of DEE domains either foster or hinder IE. Entrepreneurs are motivated by and develop strategies based on the co-effects of DEE.</p> <p>The final sub-project examined the relative effects of environmental characteristics (ECs) and personal characteristics of the entrepreneurs (PCs) on the IE process variables of motivation and strategies as well as financial and non-financial outcomes (as outputs) using the meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) approach. Analyses of the direct-effect model showed that IE outcomes strongly relate to PCs and motivation, but do not directly correlate with strategies and have a nonsignificant negative relationship with ECs. Collective analyses that combined direct- and mediated-effect models suggested that although PCs directly impact IE outcomes, the ECs’ effect on outcomes is indirect. The results imply that PCs and ECs are equally crucial to motivation, which in turn strongly determines the outcomes pursued, while strategies positively mediate the relationship between motivation and outcomes.</p> <p>Finally, three strands of IE research, arising from the IEE concept and DEE framework developed in this study, are recommended. The first involves studying larger groups with different combinations of host and home countries. The second consists of delving more deeply into DEE by examining the co-effects of paired DEE domains. The third requires analyses of IEE and DEE from an ecosystem dynamics perspective.</p>