• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.141-158
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• 2023

From the perspective of an entrepreneur, one of the most important factors for understanding the inherent limitations of a startup, reducing the risk of failure, and succeeding is the composition of the talent, that is, the founding team. Therefore, a common concern experienced by entrepreneurs in the pre-entrepreneurship stage or the early stage of startup is the choice between independent startups and co-founding start-up. Nonetheless, in Korea, the share of independent entrepreneurship is significantly higher than that of co-founding start-up. On the other hand, focusing on the fact that many successful global innovative companies are in the form of co-founding start-up, the success factors of co-founding start-up were examined. Most of the related preceding studies are studies that identify the capabilities and characteristics of individual entrepreneurs as factors influencing the survival and success of entrepreneurship, and there is a lack of research on partnerships, that is, co-founding start-up, which are common in the field of entrepreneurship ecosystems. Therefore, this study attempted a multi-case study through in-depth interviews, collection of relevant data, analysis of contextual information, and consideration of previous studies targeting co-founders of domestic startups that succeeded in opportunistic startups. Through this, a model for deriving the phased characteristics and key success factors of co-founding start-up was proposed. As a result of the study, the key element of the preliminary start-up stage was 'opportunity', and the success factors were 'opportunity recognition through entrepreneur's experience' and 'idea development'. The key element in the early stages of start-up is "start-up team," and the success factor is "trust and complement of start-up team," and synergy is shown when "diversity and homogeneity of start-up team" are harmonized. In addition, conflicts between co-founders may occur in the early stages of start-ups, which has a large impact on the survival of start-ups. The conflict between the start-up team could be overcome through constant "mutual understanding and respect through communication" and "clear division of work and role sharing." It was confirmed that the core element of the start-up growth stage was 'resources', and 'securing excellent talent' and 'raising external funds' were important factors for success. These results are expected to overcome the limitations of start-up companies, such as limited resources, lack of experience, and risk of failure, in entrepreneurship studies, and prospective entrepreneurs preparing for a start-up in a situation where the form of co-founding start-up is attracting attention as one of the alternatives to increase the success rate. It has implications for various stakeholders in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.45-66
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• 2018

Crowdfunding has become more popular than angel funding for fundraising by venture companies. Identification of success factors may be useful for fundraisers and investors to make decisions related to crowdfunding projects and predict a priori whether they will be successful or not. Recent studies have suggested several numeric factors, such as project goals and the number of associated SNS, studying how these affect the success of crowdfunding campaigns. However, prediction of the success of crowdfunding campaigns via non-numeric and unstructured data is not yet possible, especially through analysis of structural characteristics of documents introducing projects in need of funding. Analysis of these documents is promising because they are open and inexpensive to obtain. We propose a novel method to predict the success of a crowdfunding project based on the introductory text. To test the performance of the proposed method, in our study, texts related to 1,980 actual crowdfunding projects were collected and empirically analyzed. From the text data set, the following details about the projects were collected: category, number of replies, funding goal, fundraising method, reward, number of SNS followers, number of images and videos, and miscellaneous numeric data. These factors were identified as significant input features to be used in classification algorithms. The results suggest that the proposed method outperforms other recently proposed, non-text-based methods in terms of accuracy, F-score, and elapsed time.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.1531-1540
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• 2014

Since railway industry is becoming important globally, Korea government and private enterprises invest huge amount of R&D expenditure to develop railway technologies. However, ratio of successful commercialization of technology is very limited. establishment strategy of specialized institution for commercializing railway technologies is very important research issue. For example, France and Japan support railway commercialization through the specialized organization in leading the global railway industry. This study propose the critical success factors of the establishment of railway commercialization and suggest relative importance of CSF's through the hierarchical analysis. As a result, the financial resource plan(0.505) and the commercialization strategy(0.193) are important factors at the first level, and the government funding plan(0.220) and the legal/institutional support(0.150) are important factors for the commercialization organization at the second level.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.560-569
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• 2015

Crowd funding is the method of raising money for a project, companies from a large group of people via the Internet, in return for future products or equity. Kickstarter is the largest and most successful crowdfunding site where creative projects raise reward based funding. Drawing on dataset of 80,267 projects with combined funding over $1.3b from 8.1m people, this paper suggest that backer select project based on their preference on the project, instead profitability of the project. It suggests that well-established platform and big size of network increases the chance of success of the project due to a ripple effect and blockbuster effects. Clear communication about the project's idea and goal is highly correlated with success. Regular communication on the project site, such as by constant progress updates, helps the success of the project. Equity-based crowdfunding is emerging as an innovative means of raising capital for businesses, so it has been receiving a lot of attention and expectation from the government and the market. The findings of this paper and others will help to get some understanding and insight into equity-based crowdfunding. However, Kickstarter differs from equity-based crowdfunding in the goals of the backers. Kickstarter's backers are not investors, they are contributors. To understand equity-based crowdfunding, the subject will need further study.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.265-290
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• 2023

Even though crowdfunding has become popular as a novel means of raising capital for early-stage ventures and startups through an Internet-based platform, it is unclear how a funder's characteristics, such as motivation and ability, influence their information processing and pledging decision. This study aims to propose and test a research model for determining the relationships between a funder's personal attributes, information processing style, and funding intention. To test the research model, we collected data from 139 Amazon Mechanical Turk participants through an online questionnaire survey. The findings indicate that a funder's self-efficacy has a positive effect on heuristic processing but has no significant effect on systematic processing. By contrast, a funder's personal relevance positively influences both systematic and heuristic processing. Furthermore, heuristic processing, as well as perceived value and perceived risk, influence pledging intentions positively. Our findings potentially contribute to improving the design of crowdfunding platforms to better support a funder's information needs. Based on our findings, we discuss the implications of our study as well as the directions for future research.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.1-24
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• 2012

Nowadays, customer satisfaction has been one of company's major objectives, and the index to measure and communicate customer satisfaction has been generally accepted among business practices. The major issues of CSI(customer satisfaction index) are three questions, as follows: (a)what level of customer satisfaction is tolerable, (b)whether customer satisfaction and company performance has positive causality, and (c)what to do to improve customer satisfaction. Among these, the second issue is recently attracting academic research in several perspectives. On this study, the second issue will be addressed. Many researchers including Anderson have regarded customer satisfaction as core competencies, such as brand equity, customer equity. They want to verify following causality "customer satisfaction → market performance(market share, sales growth rate) → financial performance(operating margin, profitability) → corporate value performance(stock price, credit ratings)" based on the process model of marketing performance. On the other hand, Insoo Jeon and Aeju Jeong(2009) verified sequential causality based on the process model by the domestic data. According to the rejection of several hypotheses, they suggested the balance model of marketing performance as an alternative. The objective of this study, based on the existing process model, is to examine the causal relationship between customer satisfaction and corporate value performance. Anderson and Mansi(2009) proved the relationship between ACSI(American Customer Satisfaction Index) and credit ratings using 2,574 samples from 1994 to 2004 on the assumption that credit rating could be an indicator of a corporate value performance. The similar study(Sangwoon Yoon, 2010) was processed in Korean data, but it didn't confirm the relationship between KCSI(Korean CSI) and credit ratings, unlike the results of Anderson and Mansi(2009). The summary of these studies is in the Table 1. Two studies analyzing the relationship between customer satisfaction and credit ratings weren't consistent results. So, in this study we are to test the conflicting results of the relationship between customer satisfaction and credit ratings based on the research model considering Korean credit ratings. To prove the hypothesis, we suggest the research model as follows. Two important features of this model are the inclusion of important variables in the existing Korean credit rating system and government support. To control their influences on credit ratings, we included three important variables of Korean credit rating system and government support, in case of financial institutions including banks. ROA, ER, TA, these three variables are chosen among various kinds of financial indicators since they are the most frequent variables in many previous studies. The results of the research model are relatively favorable : R², F-value and p-value is .631, 233.15 and .000 respectively. Thus, the explanatory power of the research model as a whole is good and the model is statistically significant. The research model has good explanatory power, the regression coefficients of the KCSI is .096 as positive(+) and t-value and p-value is 2.220 and .0135 respectively. As a results, we can say the hypothesis is supported. Meanwhile, all other explanatory variables including ROA, ER, log(TA), GS_DV are identified as significant and each variables has a positive(+) relationship with CRS. In particular, the t-value of log(TA) is 23.557 and log(TA) as an explanatory variables of the corporate credit ratings shows very high level of statistical significance. Considering interrelationship between financial indicators such as ROA, ER which include total asset in their formula, we can expect multicollinearity problem. But indicators like VIF and tolerance limits that shows whether multicollinearity exists or not, say that there is no statistically significant multicollinearity in all the explanatory variables. KCSI, the main subject of this study, is a statistically significant level even though the standardized regression coefficients and t-value of KCSI is .055 and 2.220 respectively and a relatively low level among explanatory variables. Considering that we chose other explanatory variables based on the level of explanatory power out of many indicators in the previous studies, KCSI is validated as one of the most significant explanatory variables for credit rating score. And this result can provide new insights on the determinants of credit ratings. However, KCSI has relatively lower impact than main financial indicators like log(TA), ER. Therefore, KCSI is one of the determinants of credit ratings, but don't have an exceedingly significant influence. In addition, this study found that customer satisfaction had more meaningful impact on corporations of small asset size than those of big asset size, and on service companies than manufacturers. The findings of this study is consistent with Anderson and Mansi(2009), but different from Sangwoon Yoon(2010). Although research model of this study is a bit different from Anderson and Mansi(2009), we can conclude that customer satisfaction has a significant influence on company's credit ratings either Korea or the United State. In addition, this paper found that customer satisfaction had more meaningful impact on corporations of small asset size than those of big asset size and on service companies than manufacturers. Until now there are a few of researches about the relationship between customer satisfaction and various business performance, some of which were supported, some weren't. The contribution of this study is that credit rating is applied as a corporate value performance in addition to stock price. It is somewhat important, because credit ratings determine the cost of debt. But so far it doesn't get attention of marketing researches. Based on this study, we can say that customer satisfaction is partially related to all indicators of corporate business performances. Practical meanings for customer satisfaction department are that it needs to actively invest in the customer satisfaction, because active investment also contributes to higher credit ratings and other business performances. A suggestion for credit evaluators is that they need to design new credit rating model which reflect qualitative customer satisfaction as well as existing variables like ROA, ER, TA.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.17-30
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of the characteristics of start-up CEOs on the performance of investment attraction from the perspective of Series A investment. The results of the study are as follows. First, when the educational level of start-up CEOs was high and startup CEOs had start-up experience and investment attraction experience, venture investors such as venture capital had a significantly positive (+) effect on the investment for start-ups. This was systematically significantly positive even when control variables were introduced. When start-up CEOs had work experiences, there was no significantly positive effect on the total investment amount for start-ups but a significantly positive (+) effect on the average investment amount. Second, the standardization coefficient of total investment amount was larger in the case of start-up experience than that in the case of investment attraction experience while the standardization coefficient of average investment amount was larger in the case of investment attraction experience than that in the case of start-up experience. This suggests that the start-up experience is important for the total investment amount while the investment attraction experience is important for the average investment amount. Third, when the sales of start-ups were high at the time of Series A investment, the total investment amount and the average investment amount were also significantly high. Even if early start-ups are less profitable or have losses, the start-ups with a certain level of sales seem to be attractive investment targets for venture capital. The results of this study are useful for the investment decisions of venture capital and the financing strategies of start-ups. The implications for pre-CEOs preparing for start-ups art that the total amount of investment will increase if they have expertise through degree acquisition, challenge start-ups, gain start-up experience and implement investment attraction. Even if CEOs of start-ups do not have start-up experience, the average amount of investment for start-ups can increase if they have work experience in related industries.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.53-68
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• 2024

Generative AI is receiving a lot of attention around the world, and ways to effectively utilize it in the business environment are being explored. In particular, since the public release of the ChatGPT service, which applies the GPT-3.5 model, a large language model developed by OpenAI, it has attracted more attention and has had a significant impact on the entire industry. This study focuses on the emergence of Generative AI, especially ChatGPT, which applies OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model, to investigate its impact on the startup industry and compare the changes that occurred before and after its emergence. This study aims to shed light on the actual application and impact of generative AI in the business environment by examining in detail how generative AI is being used in the startup industry and analyzing the impact of ChatGPT's emergence on the industry. To this end, we collected company information of generative AI-related startups that appeared before and after the ChatGPT announcement and analyzed changes in industry, business content, and investment information. Through keyword analysis, topic modeling, and network analysis, we identified trends in the startup industry and how the introduction of generative AI has revolutionized the startup industry. As a result of the study, we found that the number of startups related to Generative AI has increased since the emergence of ChatGPT, and in particular, the total and average amount of funding for Generative AI-related startups has increased significantly. We also found that various industries are attempting to apply Generative AI technology, and the development of services and products such as enterprise applications and SaaS using Generative AI has been actively promoted, influencing the emergence of new business models. The findings of this study confirm the impact of Generative AI on the startup industry and contribute to our understanding of how the emergence of this innovative new technology can change the business ecosystem.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.119-138
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• 2016

Since the Industrial Revolution, which made the mass production and mass distribution of standardized goods possible, machine-made (manufactured) products have accounted for the majority of the market. However, in recent years, the phenomenon of purchasing even more expensive handmade products has become a noticeable trend as consumers have started to acknowledge the value of handmade products, such as the craftsman's commitment, belief in their quality and scarcity, and the sense of self-esteem from having them,. Consumer interest in these handmade products has shown explosive growth and has been coupled with the recent development of three-dimensional (3D) printing technologies. Etsy.com is the world's largest online handmade platform. It is no different from any other online platform; it provides an online market where buyers and sellers virtually meet to share information and transact business. However, Etsy.com is different in that shops within this platform only deal with handmade products in a variety of categories, ranging from jewelry to toys. Since its establishment in 2005, despite being limited to handmade products, Etsy.com has enjoyed rapid growth in membership, transaction volume, and revenue. Most recently in April 2015, it raised funds through an initial public offering (IPO) of more than 1.8 billion USD, which demonstrates the huge potential of online handmade platforms. After the success of Etsy.com, various types of online handmade platforms such as Handmade at Amazon, ArtFire, DaWanda, and Craft is ART have emerged and are now competing with each other, at the same time, which has increased the size of the market. According to Deloitte's 2015 holiday survey on which types of gifts the respondents plan to buy during the holiday season, about 16% of U.S. consumers chose "homemade or craft items (e.g., Etsy purchase)," which was the same rate as those for the computer game and shoes categories. This indicates that consumer interests in online handmade platforms will continue to rise in the future. However, this high interest in the market for handmade products and their platforms has not yet led to academic research. Most extant studies have only focused on machine-made products and intelligent services for them. This indicates a lack of studies on handmade products and their intelligent services on virtual platforms. Therefore, this study used signaling theory and prior research on the effects of sellers' characteristics on their performance (e.g., total sales and price premiums) in the buyer-seller relationship to identify the key influencing e-Image factors (e.g., reputation, size, information sharing, and length of relationship). Then, their impacts on the performance of shops within the online handmade platform were empirically examined; the dataset was collected from Etsy.com through the application of web harvesting technology. The results from the structural equation modeling revealed that the reputation, size, and information sharing have significant effects on the total sales, while the reputation and length of relationship influence price premiums. This study extended the online platform research into online handmade platform research by identifying key influencing e-Image factors on within-platform shop's total sales and price premiums based on signaling theory and then performed a statistical investigation. These findings are expected to be a stepping stone for future studies on intelligent online handmade services as well as handmade products themselves. Furthermore, the findings of the study provide online handmade platform operators with practical guidelines on how to implement intelligent online handmade services. They should also help shop managers build their marketing strategies in a more specific and effective manner by suggesting key influencing e-Image factors. The results of this study should contribute to the vitalization of intelligent online handmade services by providing clues on how to maximize within-platform shops' total sales and price premiums.