• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.1-11
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• 2024

In the midst of the current turbulent global economy, traditional investment metrics are undergoing a metamorphosis, signaling the onset of what's often referred to as an "Investment cold season". Early-stage startups, despite their boundless potential, grapple with immediate revenue constraints, intensifying their pursuit of critical investments. While financial indicators once took center stage in investment evaluations, a notable paradigm shift is underway. Organizational culture, once relegated to the sidelines, has now emerged as a linchpin in forecasting a startup's resilience and enduring trajectory. Our comprehensive research, integrating insights from CVF and OCAI, unveils the intricate relationship between organizational culture and its magnetic appeal to investors. The results indicate that startups with a pronounced external focus, expertly balanced with flexibility and stability, hold particular allure for investment consideration. Furthermore, the study underscores the pivotal role of adhocracy and market-driven mindsets in shaping investment desirability. A significant observation emerges from the study: startups, whether they secured investment or failed to do so, consistently display strong clan culture, highlighting the widespread importance of nurturing a positive employee environment. Leadership deeply anchored in market culture, combined with an unwavering commitment to innovation and harmonious organizational practices, emerges as a potent recipe for attracting investor attention. Our model, with an impressive 88.3% predictive accuracy, serves as a guiding light for startups and astute investors, illuminating the intricate interplay of culture and investment success in today's economic landscape.

• Korean small business review
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.165-186
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• 2021

Startups are undergoing a change throughout the growth process of startups that appear in existing studies as they move away from the existing B2B or B2C frame and expand their target customer groups to O2O, C2C. In this regard, a new type of startup known as unicorns, a unicorn which has grown rapidly in a short period of time, is being created by successfully attracting government support and external investment in recognition of the potential value of the startup. This study examined the relationship between investment attraction and growth after founding for five representative unicorns in the U.S. and Korea. As a result, it was found that private investment in Korea is passive and defensive, and is attracted after the Series A stage, compared to the U.S., where the growth potential of the startup ecosystem is positively evaluated. In addition, it found that government's support policy throughout the startup's growth process is an abstract and comprehensive policy focusing on initial funding for startups. Therefore, it was suggested that the scope of government policies should be expanded to forster startups as unicorns, and that it is necessary to establish and implement differentiated support policies for each growth of the scale-up of startups. This study is significant in that it presented the criteria for the growth stage and support of startups as well as policy support for scale-up through practical case analysis of unicorns.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Computer Information Conference
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• 2018.07a
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• pp.536-539
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• 2018

4차 산업혁명에서 핵심은 지능정보기술이다. 데이터를 처리하고 활용하며 새로운 유형의 정보를 생성하여 보유하여야만 급변하는 정보사회를 선도할 수 있다. 이제는 자급자족식의 데이터 수집에서 벗어나, 개방형 혁신환경을 조성하여 외부의 기술, 지식, 아이디어 등을 수용하여야 한다. 내 외부의 유연한 관계형성과 소통창구를 마련하여 유기적인 협의체를 구성하는 것이 중요하다. 이를 위하여 인천국제공항공사에서는 개방형 혁신 플랫폼 기반의 연구관리지원시스템을 구축하였다. 스타트업 플랫폼, R&D 협업지원, 연구관리지원 등 세 가지 요소로 구성된 본 시스템을 통해 기업의 사회적 책임 완수와 일자리 창출에 기여할 것으로 기대된다. 또한 프로세스 정립을 통한 연구 관리로 표준화된 연구과제관리 플랫폼을 마련하였다. 이를 통해 인천공항은 미래를 준비하는 공항 R&D 추진 체계 구축을 완료함으로써 일류 혁신 기업의 기반을 조성하였다.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.125-141
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• 2020

This study examines the effect of founders' strategic orientation and social capital on the performance of startups in Korean contexts. Founders' strategic orientation is proposed as the main factor to reduce the risk of failure and to increase the potential of future growth of the startup. Three main components of strategic orientation, entrepreneurial, market, technology, were simultaneously tested with a sample of Korean startups. Furthermore, founders' social capital, networks with supporting entities and the level of chemistry within founding members were also proposed to be important factors. We also tested possible mediating effects of social capital on the main impact of strategic orientation. With a sample of 79 startups founded less than 5 years in Seoul Metropolitan Areas, we found that technology orientation of founders only significantly increases the performance of startups, but both entrepreneurial and market orientation do not. Regarding social capital effect, the external networks of the founding members are effective as proposed, and also the high cohesiveness of founding members increases the startup performance. However, the mediating role of social capital is just partially confirmed. The implications of our findings, in both sense of firm's strategy and startup policy, are discussed. This study is expected to be a bridge connecting firms' strategy with startup policy-making in Korea.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.315-338
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• 2022

In 1986, Korea established legal systems to support small and medium-sized start-ups, which becomes the main pillars of national development. The legal systems have stimulated start-up ecosystems to have more than 1 million new start-up companies founded every year during the past 30 years. To analyze the trend of Korea's start-up ecosystem, in this study, we collected 1.18 million news articles from 1991 to 2020. Then, we extracted news articles that have the keywords "start-up", "venture", and "start-up". We employed network analysis and topic modeling to analyze collected news articles. Our analysis can contribute to analyzing the government policy direction shown in the history of start-up support policy. Specifically, our analysis identifies the dynamic characteristics of government influenced by external environmental factors (e.g., society, economy, and culture). The results of our analysis suggest that the start-up ecosystems in Korea have changed and developed mainly by the government policies for corporation governance, industrial development planning, deregulation, and economic prosperity plan. Our frequency keyword analysis contributes to understanding entrepreneurial productivity attributed to activities among the networked components in industrial ecosystems. Our analyses and results provide practitioners and researchers with practical and academic implications that can help to establish dedicated support policies through forecast tasks of the economic environment surrounding the start-ups. Korean entrepreneurial productivity has been empowered by growing numbers of large companies in the mobile phone industry. The spectrum of large companies incorporates content startups, platform providers, online shopping malls, and youth-oriented start-ups. In addition, economic situational factors contribute to the growth of Korean entrepreneurial productivity the economic, which are related to the global expansions of the mobile industry, and government efforts to foster start-ups. Our research is methodologically implicative. We employ natural language processes for 30 years of media articles, which enables more rigorous analysis compared to the existing studies which only observe changes in government and policy based on a qualitative manner.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.241-248
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• 2021

Firms have many ways to expand their businesses including M&A. Big companies in online and offline businesses show different ways of expansion with different objectives to expand their digital businesses quickly. Expansions for technical reasons are to acquire technologies they do not have while those for business reasons are M&A for offline companies to have competence in markets by acquiring online companies. Other ways of expansions include spin-off and group participation after investments for startups. Various ways of expansions are chosen because they are optimal choices depending on situations the companies face, and they have different strengths and weaknesses. To analyze the strengths and weaknesses of those options for expansion at this stage would be academically valuable, and also practically meaningful in terms of providing insights for companies' decision making in choosing opitions for expansions. M&A of online companies to make multi-channels by offline companies have risks of failing to internalize online companies and have enough synergy effects. Also, spin-off is a relatively less risky way of expansion while the speed of expansion is slower than establishing external startups with some shares of equity and making them as affiliated companies. External startups are good for speed of expansion while there are risks of legal regulations and negative awareness by the public.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.1-15
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• 2016

Startups in Korea are experiencing for themselves the laws of survival through competition in the local and international market, and are performing active business movements based on these. Korea's economic growth rate is 2.6% due to the slump in the domestic demand and reduced exports brought by the MERSC incident in 2015. The Korea Development Institute has estimated the economic growth rate in 2016 to be around 3.0%. South Korea's economy is facing the crisis of low-growth solidification due to the decrease in economic growth, and it is forecasted that growth without employment and polarization will worsen. Startups in the high-tech industrial generation of a particular field wherein the market environment is rapidly changing must maintain a competitive advantage with the capabilities and functions exclusive to them. It is very important that they maintain a competitive edge by utilizing the capabilities exclusive to startup companies. Likewise, the accumulation of resources is also crucial in determining the success of a startup business. In a poor local startup ecosystem, majority of the startup companies are performing their business activities while striving for survival, rather than success. About 80% are struggling to survive and are failing to overcome the "Death Valley" faced 3-5 years after establishing the company. Since majority of the startups fail to achieve results during the initial stages of foundation, the importance of research on business activities and achievement during the early stages of establishment is being raised. In accordance to this, this research has performed an actual analysis on how the activities of startups during their preparation phase and early stages affect their achievements. A survey was done on the CEOs or executives (people in a position to make decisions) of local small and medium-sized enterprises that are considered start-ups, and 203 valid data were collected and analyzed. Results showed that the discoveries and utilized activities necessary for the businesses of startups have a significant impact on their achievement through the entrepreneur resources and external partners' cooperation; additionally, the related implications were discussed.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.319-325
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• 2020

In this paper, a discontinuous-conduction mode (DCM) DC-DC buck converter is presented for mobile device applications. The buck converter consists of compensator for stable operations, pulse-width modulation (PWM) logic, and power switches. In order to achieve small hardware form-factor, the number of off-chip components should be kept to be minimum, which can be realized with simple and efficient frequency compensation and digital soft start-up circuits. Burst-mode operation is included for preventing the efficiency from degrading under very light load condition. The DCM DC-DC buck converter is fabricated with 0.18-um BCDMOS process. Programmable output with external resistors is typically set to be 1.8V for the input voltage between 2.8 and 5.0V. With a switching frequency of 1MHz, measured maximum efficiency is 92.6% for a load current of 100mA.

• 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.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.1-12
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• 2024

This paper aims to examine the effectiveness of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) in attracting and retaining top talent for startups and venture companies in the context of their implementation in July 2024. The study investigates whether RSUs align with their original intent and identifies additional measures to enhance their effectiveness. Additionally, the paper explores strategies to actively adopt and revitalize RSUs in the business field from the perspectives of experts representing key market participants within the early-stage startup ecosystem in Korea. The study employs a three-pronged approach. First, a pre-study examines how RSUs overcome the limitations of existing stock compensation schemes, the benefits they offer, and the key conditions for ensuring market-friendly effectiveness. Second, experts involved in the RSU bill's early stages identify five issues that need to be addressed to ensure the bill's market-friendly effectiveness: RSU vesting conditions, RSU vesting targets, RSU vesting scope, RSU vesting timing, and RSU vesting-related tax benefits. Third, the study conducts an FGI with experts representing key market players in the early-stage startup ecosystem to examine the effectiveness and activation measures of the proposed RSU scheme, RSU adoption within the early-stage startup ecosystem minimizing conflict of interests with existing shareholders such as venture capital investor. Finally, experts emphasize the importance of clearly defining and communicating RSU benefits to businesses for effective RSU activation. This study's significance lies in its derivation of various insights from FGI research on the effective adoption and activation of RSUs within the early-stage startup ecosystem. Moreover, it is expected to provide a methodology for gauging opinion-gathering procedures for new bills introduced to foster startup and venture company growth.