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

47 NTU Management Review Vol. 30 No. 1 Apr. 2020 numerous unknown factors, continually changing internal, and external factors that cause entrepreneurs to have various resource demands and apply strategic actions at different venture stages. Several entrepreneurs have indicated that they apply different social network behaviors at different venture stages. Thus, the venture stage is added as a moderating variable. As new venture operations grow and stabilize, entrepreneurs focus on leveraging external relationships to achieve continual growth and address the challenge of developing new products or markets (Wu et al., 2008). By using the classification systems adopted by Koberg et al. (1996) and Sullivan and Ford (2014), ventures are sorted into new businesses and established firms categories to examine the effects of various venture stages (i.e., early and late stages) on social networking behaviors and the innovativeness of opportunities. 3.2 Study 2 3.2.1 Research Design The purpose of Study 2 is to examine the influence of venture stage on the relationship between networking actions and the innovativeness of opportunities. Studies are conducted on the individual founders of new ventures to avoid complications from the multiple networks challenges encountered by start-up teams. To test the hypotheses, a survey was conducted from March 2012 to September 2012. First, two ICT entrepreneurs were survey to do preliminary testing of the questionnaire and formatting and wording were revised based on their suggestions. Preliminary testing is also conducted with the modified questionnaire by administering it to 30 ICT entrepreneurs from a university- affiliated business incubator in Taiwan. At last, 2000 questionnaires are randomly mailed to registered ICT companies identified using the databases of the Taiwanese Ministry of Economic Affairs, science parks, and a university-affiliated business incubator. The mailed questionnaire consists of a cover letter, the questionnaire, and a stamped return envelope. The final sample consists of 86 complete questionnaires with a response rate of 4.3%. Of the respondents, 87% are men. The average age of the respondents is 43.2 years (standard deviation; SD = 8.6). In terms of education level, 63% of the respondents hold a 4-year college degree (20.5% hold a master’s degree). On average, the participants have 10.66 years of full-time work experience (SD = 6.94). Most ventures are small and medium-sized enterprises, and 33.3% and 75% of the participants established their