Abstract

Entrepreneurship is widely recognized as an important factor shaping the economic performance of an economy. By adopting the definition of entrepreneurship as a process of discovering and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities, this thesis aims to explore various aspects of entrepreneurship in the context of a transition country, Vietnam. The individual-level study investigates the determinants of successful entrepreneurship in terms of human capital, social capital, and their interaction. Indeed, human capital with respect to education, experience, and learning significantly stimulates entrepreneurial performance; the effect of social capital itself is limited, but positively complementary to human capital. Next, the firm-level research explores how product diversification as a strategic act of corporate entrepreneurship impacts on entrepreneurial performance. The finding indicates a positive and non-linear effect of diversification strategy on firm profitability: the positive effect is increasing as entrepreneurial expertise is exploited at a greater scope to an optimum point and falling off as product scope moves away from resource and governance scope. Finally, the regional-level study sets up an analytical integrated framework on the dynamic relationships among entrepreneurship, new firm entry and incumbent firms to support the statement that the growth of incumbent firms stimulates new entries in a region. These three empirical studies are based on unique micro datasets of the Vietnamese economy from different sources and adopt advanced econometric methodologies to test hypothesized relationships.