Abstract: When faced with increasingly fierce market competition, many new ventures rely on the integration of entrepreneurship and supply chain to achieve unique competitive advantages, thereby overcoming disadvantages related to scale and resources. However, the research on entrepreneurial supply chain is still in infancy, and the existing researches lack an in-depth discussion on the mechanism of entrepreneurial supply chain’s effect on the performance of new ventures. The improvement of new venture performance is faced with resource constraints and opportunistic behaviors of partners. Building entrepreneurial supply chain capabilities and adopting appropriate supply chain governance mechanisms have become the main means for ventures to obtain external entrepreneurial resources and conclude external relations. Existing literatures lack a thorough discussion of the configuration interaction between entrepreneurial supply chain capabilities and governance mechanisms. This study uses 104 auto supplier startups as a sample, and applies the configurational theory and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) approach to integrate five conditions from entrepreneurial supply chain capabilities and governance mechanisms, in order to explore the mechanism of multiple conjunctural causation of differences in venture performance. Results show that: There are 3 configuration solutions to drive high performance and 2 configuration solutions to drive non-high performance. High-level capabilities and high-level governance mechanisms appear simultaneously in the three high-performance configurations, which interact to improve the venture performance, while in non-high-performance configurations, capabilities and governance mechanisms do not appear at the same time. The findings reveal the existence of asymmetric causality compared with high-performance driving mechanisms, which helps to improve the understanding of the substitution and complementarity of key elements of new venture, and provides fruitful results for the improvement of the venture performance in the supply chain.

Key words: entrepreneurial supply chain capabilities, governance mechanisms, venture performance, qualitative comparative analysis, configurational perspective