Chinese University of Hong Kong Archives

Hong Kong – Previous entrepreneurial experience is one key factor that can influence and spell out success for people planning a start-up launch, a big contrast to the common anecdotal impression that ‘college dropouts’ have successfully established their own companies, a new research article shows.

Through the research, data have pointed out that entrepreneurs with no prior experience tend to concentrate too much on one role, such as being the product developer and lose sight of other important things. On the other hand, experienced entrepreneurs tend to do a more balanced job.

Business ideas of experienced entrepreneurs were 12.7 percent more creative and 7.7 percent more profitable than inexperienced entrepreneurs when they were placed in that situation. Meanwhile, experienced entrepreneurs were 9.4 percent less innovative than inexperienced entrepreneurs when there was no tension between the two roles.

Furthermore, the study found that entrepreneurs with less experience tend to produce fewer ideas that were deemed novel when asked to assume the role of a businessperson, whereas experienced entrepreneurs were able to maintain their ability to generate creative ideas even when they were in salesman mode. On the other hand, inexperienced entrepreneurs produced fewer ideas that were deemed by experts to be commercially viable when they assume the role of an inventor while experienced entrepreneurs did not display any reduction in performance.

Research-Proponents-Enterpreneur-Background-Business-Success — The study’s research proponents namely: (left to right) **Ying-yi Hong**, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Management at the Business School of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; **Siran Zhan**, Assistant Professor of Management at University of New South Wales College; and **Marilyn Ang Uy**, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Division of Strategy, Management, and Organization at Nanyang Business School

“Being an entrepreneur is a balancing act. Although entrepreneurs should seek to produce products which are both unique and useful as well as being commercially viable, doing so can be difficult. For example, an entrepreneur may channel their inner inventor to create highly unique products, but that’s no good if they don’t consider market demand. It is essential for entrepreneurs to achieve both goals simultaneously to succeed,” says Ying-yi Hong, Choh-Ming Li professor of management at CUHK Business School, and one of the proponents of the study.

The study was conducted alongside Siran Zhan at the University of New South Wales College and Prof. Marilyn Ang Uy at Nanyang Technological University.

“We expect experienced entrepreneurs to have developed a more holistic knowledge structure in which their inventor and businessperson roles are integrated. In contrast, novice entrepreneurs who lack prior entrepreneurial experience may see their two role identities as separate and disjointed. Thus, experienced entrepreneurs tend to be capable of processing a greater amount of information in a given instance and see the big picture, which novices tend to neglect,” Hong commented.

The study was conducted with the help of 108 entrepreneurs who were in the process of starting a new venture to participate in an experiment, 40 of which were experienced entrepreneurs who had started businesses before.

“These [business] situations would have stimulated them to reconcile their different demands and as a result they become better able to distribute their attention to the related tasks evenly. In doing so, experienced entrepreneurs develop a close association between their creative and business mindsets, such that the activation of one role would trigger the activation of the other. Therefore, an experienced entrepreneur can be an inventor and a salesperson at the same time in different situations,” the researchers concluded in a press statement.

Hong Kong, China – When the coronavirus pandemic hit nations around the world, the hospitality industry was one of the sectors that bore the brunt of sunken sales due to restricted in-person interactions, and the use of robotics might just be the saving element that businesses are looking for, suggested a study by Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

According to the study, robotics can help restaurants and hotels bring customers back at a time when people are worried about catching the disease by human transmission. Furthermore, among the two countries, the US and China that were studied, the effect of robots was more profound with the latter.

One restaurant complex in Guangdong province in China has already made the jump to robotics with its operations completely run by a robot staff, executing food preparations and cooking upon order. Meanwhile, in the U.S., a robotic arm called “Flippy” is being tested by fast-food chain White Castle to cook products such as french fries.

While the use of robots is proving to be a big help, the study found that there were still a lot of challenges faced for its applications such as inaccurate interpretation of human signals and on a larger scale, the high investment cost to the risk of mechanical breakdowns

Japanese hotel Henn na has encountered such difficulties where guests complained about being woken up in the middle of the night when Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants mistook snoring as a voice command. Meanwhile, a Chinese restaurant, Heweilai found its company halting its deployment of robots as they keep bumping into each other due to limited facility.

In terms of consumers’ response to robots, the study found that consumers are positively receptive to robots in both hotels and restaurants with the majority of the respondents thinking that they lessen interpersonal interactions and the risk of getting COVID-19.

Associate professor at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at CUHK Lisa Wan said, “Our results show that with the pandemic dominating people’s awareness, service robots could signal low interpersonal contact, reduce the perceived risk of virus transmission, and in turn increase visit intention.”

According to Wan, the findings suggest that the use of service robots could be more salient in collectivistic cultures such as China.

“This could be attributed to more reliance on interpersonal cues in decision-making for collectivists. Future research may explore the cultural impacts which will have significant theoretical and practical implications for the successful infusion of service robots in the tourism industry across cultures,” Wan said.

Furthermore, Wan suggested that there is still a lot of work to be done to learn more about intelligent automation and the consumers’ response towards service robots in the tourism industry.