Exploring the Motivations of User Entrepreneurs - A Cost-Benefit Perspective

• Main Authors: Fang-Yi Chen, 陳芳儀
• Other Authors: Chia-Liang Hung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/pn535r

碩士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 資訊管理學系 === 104 === In 2004, 46.6% of the start-ups in the US, which have survived more than five years, are from user entrepreneurs. Venture capital companies prefer to invest start-ups established by experienced lead users and the ratio is about 4 to 5.8 percent. The reason is lead users could obtain more opportunities for a new business than regular users. Since being unsatisfied with the existing products or services, lead users would like to create their own innovative products to meet their needs. Up to now, there are only few literatures reviewing the motivational factors that influence leader users to become user entrepreneurs. Therefore, this research aimed to explore the motivations of user entrepreneurs from a cost-benefit perspective and prove the association between lead users and user entrepreneurs. This research applied SPSS Statistics 22 software for exploratory factor analysis, divided samples into three level scores of user entrepreneurial characteristics and summarized the five entrepreneurial motivations: Product knowledge benefits, Market experience benefits, Innovation incentive benefits, Expectation fading benefits and Environment driving benefits. The results showed the characteristics of lead users have partially significant influences on user entrepreneurs and verified lead users discover new products earlier than others. Then, they develop new technology from products they have used and aim at target market much faster than other entrepreneurs to reduce the cost to start a business. Finally, the results revealed three background factors affect the characteristics of lead users a lot, including incomes before starting a business, seed funding and involvement in auxiliary plans. In other words, if an entrepreneur’s income before starting a business is less than thirty thousand NT dollars and the estimated amount of venture capital is higher than five million NT dollars, he/ she should consider applying for bank financing, business support from the government or entrepreneurial auxiliary plans to increase the possibility of a success business.