eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

The purpose of this study was primarily to find whether entrepreneurial orientation (EO) theory can be applied in Finnish immigrant-led enterprises’ context. The positive relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance has been widely researched, thus we wanted to test the EO and firm performance relationship in this context too. Secondly, we also wanted to study in the same context whether EO is a unidimensional or a multidimensional construct in explaining the firm performance. And thirdly, we also wanted to study the impact of EO and firm performance in new immigrant-led Finnish ventures. However, the study doesn’t cover the entire population of immigrant-led enterprises in Finland; it covers only the immigrant-led enterprises (N = 855) that had received the consultation services from Enterprise Helsinki between 2008 and 2011. The empirical part of this research was based on a quantitative study. We designed a survey based on the popularly used EO and firm performance scales as suggested by our literature framework. The questionnaire was sent to the founders or the top managements of immigrant-led enterprises that had received services of Enterprise Helsinki at some point during their entrepreneurial career in Finland. A total of 78 responses were received, corresponding to a response rate of over 9 %. The data collected for this research were analyzed according to our theoretical framework and the research objectives. First the reliability and validity tests were performed in order to move to the next step of statistical analyses. We used SPSS tool for doing the statistical analyses. The statistical methods used in this research included correlation matrix, regression analysis including both the multi-level regression and curvilinear regression. Our results suggested that there is a positive relationship between EO and firm performance in the immigrant-led enterprises' context; however the correlation is not a strong one. Our findings also showed that EO is a multidimensional construct in explaining the relationship of EO with firm performance. And finally, we determined that the impact of EO on firm performance in new ventures is not different than older firms.