臺大管理論叢 NTU Management Review VOL.30 NO.1

Entrepreneurial Networking Actions and Innovativeness of Opportunities: The Moderator Role of Venture Stage 44 which influences organizational innovation. Their results indicate that the processing of external information is critical to both new and established enterprises. During early venture stages, enterprises typically lack resources and do not have fully established social networks in their industries (Grossman et al., 2012; Koberg et al., 1996). Thus, they often leverage ties on the basis of necessity rather than convenience (Newbert et al., 2013). Nascent entrepreneurs perform extremely strategic social networking actions to seek and develop the innovativeness of opportunities (Vissa, 2012). Previous empirical studies produce similar results. Greve and Salaff (2003) suggest that a large network is more beneficial to early-stage ventures than to late-stage ventures. Sullivan and Marvel (2011) conduct an investigation on 174 owners of enterprises that were less than 1 year old and indicate that the number of network ties positively moderate the relationship between the knowledge sets of entrepreneurs and the number of employees. Newbert et al. (2013) observes that the more heterogeneous the strengths provided by a nascent entrepreneur’s network of ties, the more likely it is that an organization would emerge. In other words, nascent entrepreneurs should be vigilant in their networking efforts throughout the emergence phase to ensure success. On the basis of resource dependency theory, Sullivan and Ford (2014) analyze differences in network size during the venture-launch and early developmental stages. The results indicate that network size is positively correlated with enterprise success during the two stages. A large network during the early stage of development benefits entrepreneurial resources because it enables entrepreneurs to mitigate the limitations imposed by an overdependence on resources. Therefore, when problems such as survival concerns and high levels of uncertainty arise, new enterprise entrepreneurs must acquire novel information from various domains by broadening their social networks to create the innovativeness of opportunities which can be used to access new clients or markets (Vissa, 2012). Consequently, this study posits that applying network broadening actions during the early stage of a venture exerts a more positive effect on the innovativeness of opportunities than applying network broadening actions during the late stage (Hypothesis 3a). H3a: The positive effects of network broadening actions on the innovativeness of opportunities are greater among early-stage ventures than among late-stage ventures.