Abstract:

With China’s rapid economic and social development and the increasing internationalization of higher education, the number of students studying abroad and returning after graduation keeps growing. In recent years, most of the returned students were born in the 1980s or 90s, who obtained a bachelor degree or master degree at public expense or their own expense, i.e. socalled ‘overseas returnees of the new generation’. They are not only internationalminded, but also skilled at the international advanced technology and business management, belonging to a typical ‘intelligence intensive group’. However, under the wave of massive entrepreneurship and innovation, they are having difficulties starting their business. This paper first presents a new analysis framework, in which entrepreneurial process is divides into four stages: seeding (preentrepreneurship), budding (early entrepreneurship), rooting (midentrepreneurship) and fruiting (mature entrepreneurship). Then, adopting descriptive statistics and regression analysis based on the questionnaire survey of 1200 new generation overseas returnees in Hunan, it conducts an attribution analysis of the difficulties facing the overseas returnees of the new generation from four aspects including individual traits, entrepreneurial resources, entrepreneurial preparation and retention policy environment. The descriptive statistics shows that, in the 1200 new generation overseas returnees, 320 （26.5%）chose to be employed,528(44.1%) chose to start a business, and 280（23.5%）have employment and entrepreneurial experience. In short, there are more entrepreneurs than employees among the new generation overseas returnees. However, more than 78% entrepreneurs of the new generation overseas returnees face serious difficulties, and there are great variations in the entrepreneurial bugs. For example, the item Your business is a massive layoffs has the lowest score, only 1.54 points; and the item The costs of your product or service continue to rise has the highest points, i.e. 4.28 points. Regression analysis shows that the main contributing factors include gender disparities and specialty differences in individual traits, inadequate entrepreneurial preparation, deficient entrepreneurial resources especially social capital, and imperfect and exclusive retention policy. In order to encourage the new generation overseas returnees to start businesses, we should establish a “revolving door” system to bring in more talents of new generation overseas returnees, formulate preferential entrepreneurship policies, build a entrepreneurial platform and financing dynamics for new generation overseas returnees.

Key words: new generation overseas returnees, entrepreneurship, resources, retention policy