Accelerating startups: the role of government assistance programs and entrepreneurial orientation

The stage of emergence is found to be most crucial stage not only for entrepreneurs, but also for a researcher. Nascent entrepreneurship research exposed it uniqueness of the study where the discipline of the studies is still at the early stage but has received much attention in recent years. The performance of nascent ventures depends on various factors including their business strategy and their resources acquisition. This study aimed to investigate the nature of relationship that exists between entrepreneurial orientation and nascent venture performance in Malaysia. Furthermore, this study intended to examine the moderating effect of government assistance programs on relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and nascent venture performance. This study employs a quantitative approach of research and survey method was used to conduct study on 184 Malay-owned nascent venture in Malaysia. The data was analyzed with the SPSS version 22 statistical technique. Prior to the analysis, the data was cleaned, inspected for outliers, normality, factor analysis, and reliability test to meet the assumptions for the multivariate analysis. Correlation analysis indicated all the factors have a significant positive effect on nascent venture performance. The regression analysis further reveals innovativeness and risk taking of entrepreneurial orientation founds not to be significant with nascent venture performance. Hierarchical regression analysis was utilized to examine the moderating effect. Finding revealed government assistance programs only to have moderating effect between the relationship of proactiveness and performance of nascent venture in Malaysia. These findings demonstrated why the numbers of new business creation cannot survived until maturity stage of business development. It further justifies the engagement between academician, ministries, government and entrepreneurs in developing new business model for nascent ventures is demandin