Abstract:Entrepreneur’s tacit knowledge acquisition is an important factor affecting opportunity ability and enterprise’s core competitiveness. Opportunity ability is vital to the enterprise’s survival, development and business performance. But few scholars have studied the mechanism of tacit knowledge acquisition of entrepreneurs, opportunity ability, and the entrepreneurial performance. This paper constructs the theoretical model of relationship among tacit knowledge acquisition, opportunity ability and entrepreneurial performance. Through individual interviews with 18 entrepreneurs and questionnaire survey to 382 entrepreneurs, this paper makes empirical test for the conceptual model. The empirical analysis shows that:(1)the opportunity ability plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between tacit knowledge acquisition and entrepreneurial performance.(2)cognitive tacit knowledge acquisition has bigger influence on each dimension of opportunity ability, growth performance and innovation performance, and skilled tacit knowledge acquisition has bigger influence on survival performance.(3) compared with the ability of opportunity evaluation and opportunity utilization, opportunity identification ability has bigger influence on each dimension of entrepreneurial performance.