Disruption or New Order?: The Emergence of the Unicorn Bike-Sharing Entrepreneurship in China

Abstract

The most significant and successful technological entrepreneurship in Asia in 2017 is perhaps the start-up and diffusion of the bike sharing service in China. While bike-sharing system has long been an initiative taken primarily by city governments to improve the city transport, the top 2 private start-up businesses of and Mobike from China, sweep the market with unprecedented bike penetration and user growth, despite the social disorder of chaotic bike-parking and deserted bikes. This paper examines how this innovative technological entrepreneurship fulfills the users' needs, fills the market gap and revamps the game rules by new business models. Furthermore, the challenges faced by the start-ups in profit generation and business sustainability will also be discussed. Case study approach is adopted where secondary data were analyzed and face-to-face interview with the executive was conducted to identify the factors driving the innovation diffusion and the new business model. This paper aims to fill the research gap in the technological entrepreneurship with the new business model in the emerging sharing economy start-ups, as well as to provide insights to sharing economy business management especially in China context.