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

57 NTU Management Review Vol. 30 No. 1 Apr. 2020 As enterprises enter the growth and stability stage, entrepreneurs should have already established substantial networks. Entrepreneurs should locate and establish long-term relationships with people with mutual interests or cooperation potential among their existing networks. In particular, in Chinese society, business partners tend to regard each other as friends. This enables entrepreneurs to increase friendship based connections, constantly expand network relationships (provided that their networks are sufficiently large), and procure exclusive information and resources for the development of innovative opportunities. Regarding policy implications, unlike traditional industries, in which product, service, and business model innovation is slow and limited, the ICT industry is characterized by rapid environmental and technological changes that must be monitored to enable responding to the emergence of new opportunities. Consequently, entrepreneurs should not limit themselves to their interpersonal networks. During the early stage, they should interact and cooperate with members of other industries according to their availability and capability. Because external information access does not necessarily require prior industry-specific experience, recognizing innovative opportunities through interactions with others in the environment may be possible for those that lack experience. For those seeking to foster entrepreneurship, there may be some value in connecting these external interactions with processes leading to the generation and assessment of innovative opportunities. 6.2 Limitations Certain limitations to this study provide avenues for future research. First, this study examines networking actions applied at two venture stages. However, because this study used a cross-sectional method, the results do not reflect how the networking actions performed by entrepreneurs changed over various venture stages. Future studies should consider applying a longitudinal approach (e.g., Newbert et al., 2013) to investigate changes in networking actions throughout various venture stages and their resulting long- term effects. Although this study proves that the results of Harman’s one-factor test of common method variance is not significant, future studies can measure objective indicators such as opportunity value or the feasibility of implementing opportunities. Quantified concepts can be used to analyze the innovativeness of opportunities, for instance, by comparing the number of projects or new business transactions obtained within a certain time by certain