• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.47-61
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• 2014

Many angel investors hesitate to invest in early-stage company. Most early-stage company has no sales and only R&D step project or in early approach of market. So it's impossible to evaluate early-stage company quantitatively. Therefore many angel investors depend on CEO's tendency to evaluate company and make decision for investment. The purpose of this study is discover the entrepreneurial characteristics of CEO and the importance level which affect on the angel investors decision making factors for investment. To identify the factors of entrepreneurial characteristics, survey was conducted by Delphi Technique which is involved by 20 experts who is angel investment club members, venture capitalists, CEOs and officers. Three rounds of survey results derived 10 elements of entrepreneurial characteristics for investment decision making factors including reliability, risk sensitivity, passion, perseverance, integrity, leadership, startup experience, organizational management skills, innovation and social networking. In addition, this study derived the importance level of elements of entrepreneurial characteristics based on the AHP(Analytic Hierarchy Process) theory and maintained the logical consistency by pair-wise comparison for each element. As a result of analyzing the importance of entrepreneurial characteristics, the sequence is reliability (18.1%), integrity (15.9%), leadership (11.7%), organizational management skills (10.0%), social networking (9.5%), passion(9.1%), perseverance(8.4%), innovation(8.1%), startup experience(5.3%) and risk sensitivity(3.9%) respectively. The significance of this study is somewhat decrease limit of the uncertainty arising from angel investors and angel investors can help a decision making, by discover factors of entrepreneurial characteristics that can be called the biggest influencing factors among Investor's investment decision-making In early stage companies and compare importance.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.27-37
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• 2015

Start up a company is critical to the regional economy and job creation and so get support from government and other organizations, but there are still exist of high rate of failure and CEO's stressful fear of failure. New firms are of utmost importance for the vitality of national economic driving forces but for those failed firms, they caused social and economic problems directly and indirectly, and brought frustration to the founders. The many education and research programs about entrepreneurship and venture creation were undertaken by the country and organizations, but the education and research about the vigilance of failed to start up company were almost ignored. If the attention can be put into the research about failed companies and the research can make the founders and pre-CEOs aware the failure of establishing a company, that would be very valuable as scenarios to see the company risks. This case study shows the finding the reasons which caused the failure of small venture companies and it's implications in the filed of establishing companies. The technology based venture company which had run 10 years in Daedeok's IT field was selected as the research object. The results show that the important factors such as entrepreneur characteristics(lack of communication and management knowledge), business management(lack of business expertise) and technology(loss of unique feature of product and lack of product extension) were the root cause of failures.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.125-146
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• 2013

Nowadays, the performance of the mobile game sales is influencing the ranking of game companies listed on KOSDAQ. In the meantime, venture capital companies had focused on online game. Recently, however, they have great interest in mobile games and mobile game companies. In addition, angel investors and accelerators are increasing investment for the mobile game companies. The most important issues for mobile game investor is how to evaluate the mobile game companies and their contents. Therefore, this study derived the evaluation factors for the mobile game company. And research method converged of the opinions of both supply side and demand side of the game industry. Ten professionals who are responsible for the supply of the game industry and CEO group & development experts of game development company were selected for survey in this study. Also ten professionals who are responsible for the demand of the game industry and the investment company were selected for survey in this study. And Delphi technique was performed according to the survey. Management skills, development capabilities, game play, feasibility, operational capabilities has emerged as five evaluation factors to evaluate the mobile game company. And the 20 sub-factors including CEO's reliability were derived. AHP(Analytic Hierarchy Process) theory is applied to analyze the importance of the qualitative elements which were derived by Delphi technique. As a result, the analysis hierarchy of evaluation factors for the mobile game company was created. Pair-wise comparison for each element was performed to analyze the importance. As a result, 'Core fun of the game' (12,2%), 'Involvement of the game' (10.3%), 'Security Reliability' (8.9%), 'Core developers' ability' (7.6%) appeared in order of importance. The significance of this study is offering more objective methodology for realistic assessment and importance of elements to evaluate mobile game company.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.145-157
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• 2017

SMEs play an important role in the domestic economy. Regarding competency to respond flexibly to unpredictable changes, agility of SMEs is more emphasized. Entrepreneurship orientation is an important factor in the source of SMEs that enable such competency. Entrepreneurial orientation refers to the tendency of a CEO or a member of a corporation to be innovative, risk-taking, and active in the face of various market opportunities. In other words, it refers to the tendency to be expressed in the activities of the entire company without regard to specific technologies or industries. Entrepreneurial orientation has a direct or indirect effect on business performance. Therefore, in this study, we conducted theoretical and empirical studies on the effect of entrepreneurial orientation of SME managers on business performance. Research hypotheses were derived through theoretical research. We focused on the mediating effect of innovation activity and tried to identify the mechanism that entrepreneurial orientation leads to business performance through product innovation and service innovation activity. We investigated whether innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking, which are sub-variables of entrepreneurial orientation, affect business performance through product innovation and service innovation. We conducted a survey of SMEs in Busan and Kyungnam regions to examine the research hypotheses. The results show that product innovation and service innovation have mediating effects. The results of the study are as follows. Product innovation has mediating effect of innovativeness and risk-taking on business performance. Service innovation has been found to mediate innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk-taking on business performance. There was a difference in the mediation effect between the two innovations. Product innovation showed a low mediating effect and a large direct effect. On the other hands, service innovation is relatively more mediating than product innovation. The implications of the research results are derived in relation to the essential differences between product innovation and service innovation. Limitations of the study and directions for future research are presented.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.37-50
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• 2020

This study aims to investigate meaningful relationship between technology appraisal indices and SMEs' financial performances for their continuous growth. The empirical data for this study were based on the technology appraisal results of Korea Technology Finance Corporation(KOTEC) and the financial data of the following 2 years 0f 3,688 SMEs. The meaningful differences between SMEs with superb financial performances and the others, by using t-test analysis, statistically were verified in 25 indices(75.8%) out of total 33 indices. All of five independent variables, namely CEO's capability, technology manpower, R&D intensiveness, market competitiveness and investment feasibility, were verified to have a positive effect on business feasibility respectively and business feasibility also has a positive influence on financial performance, such as sales growth, labor productivity and financial stability.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.155-166
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• 2020

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of self-efficacy, hope, and resilience, which are factors of the positive psychology capital of the re-startup CEO, on the quality of decision-making through the absorption capacity, and the effect of the re-startup's absorption capacity. In particular, this study was started from the question of how positive psychological capital would affect to the re-startup CEO. The survey was conducted from re-founders who received funding from Korea SMEs & Startups Agency. And 144 sample data were analyzed by using SPSS 24.0 for descriptive statistics and by using Smart PLS 3.0. for SEM. The factors of Positive Psychological Capital were extracted to three factors: self-efficacy, hope, and resilience. As a result, it is shown that self-efficacy had a positive effect on potential absorption capacity, and hope had no effect on potential absorption capacity, and positive effects on realized absorption capacity. Resilience has been shown to have a positive effect on potential absorption and realized absorption capacity. It has been shown that potential absorption and realized absorption have a positive effect on the quality of decision making. This study is intended to provide theoretical and practical implications.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.223-235
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• 2022

The satisfaction and performance levels of employees also depend upon the leadership styles adopted by corporate leaders. Meanwhile, organizational identification is a fundamental organizational behavioural concept in business that influences employee belongingness with the organization. Taking into account the relevance of this research topic, this paper aims to understand of organizational identification and leadership styles in SMEs. It also investigated the mediation role of organizational true. For the analysis, a questionnaire survey was conducted on employees of SMEs, and the collected data were analyzed using the hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Analysis results are as follows: First, out of leadership style, transformational leadership, transactional Leadership had a positive effect on job satisfaction. Second, organizational identification had a positive effect on job satisfaction. Third, in the relationship between leadership, organizational identification and job satisfaction, the mediating effect of organizational true had significant transformational leadership→organizational truer→job satisfaction, transactional leadership→organizational truer→job satisfaction, organizational identification→organizational truer→job satisfaction. The results of this study show that the role of middle managers is very important in SMEs. The leadership of SME managers can also be linked to organizational performance through the job satisfaction of workers. Therefore, SME' CEO should provide opportunities to receive professional training on the leadership of middle managers. In addition, SME' CEO need a strategy to instill a positive image of the organization in workers through the organizational vision.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.135-154
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• 2020

This paper analyzes the 5,521 samples of the small and medium-sized businesses(SMBs) obtained from the Korea Credit Guarantee Fund. From January 2014 to September 2019, 85% of the SMBs have 5 or fewer full-time employees. The proportion of SMBs is overwhelmed by the elderly men, and most founders are the CEO. Also, about 87% of the workplace types are rented, while 64% of the CEO's residence types are owner-occupation. 47% of the financial grade score is less than 10 points out of 100 and 80% of SMBs have less than 200 million won of the loan guarantee. In particular, the total guarantee loan amount or the days of net guarantee have significantly positive relations with the working period of the CEO in the same industry, the number of employees, the operation period of SMBs, and the corporate business type. In the case of the financial grading score which has the highest weight in overall credit rating gets higher with the higher number of employees, the longer the operation period, and the corporate business type. However, the quantified non-financial grading score has no significant relationship with other explanatory variables, except for the corporate business type. This implies that a non-financial grade score is measured by other determinants that are not observed by the Korea credit guarantee fund. The pure non-financial grade score has positive relations with the working period of the CEO. Overall, this paper would help Korean SMBs upgrade their credit ratings and expand the money supply when there is no standardized credit rating model or no publicly available evaluation criteria for SMBs. We expect this paper provides important insights for further research and policy-makers for SMBs. In particular, to address the financial needs of thin-filers such as SMBs, technology-based financial services (TechFin) would use alternative data to evaluate the financial capabilities of thin-filers and to develop new financial services.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.35-48
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• 2018

This study aims to assess the training effect of QFD(Quality Functional Deployment) program for 3 years over startups, adopted from the conventional QFD widely used in the large companies to break up to a sluggish sales and growth, for employees working in startup whether the participants in startup and venture company taking this lessons into their real tasks or not. In particular, the focus of this study falls on figuring out whether individual characteristics of the participants play a role in moderating effect over transfer intension factors and its link path structure. The research results drive out two significant findings. First, in terms of relationship between the influence of transfer intension by self-efficacy and the validity of training content with the learner's readiness, the moderating effect of demographic features of the participants is effective partially by the sex and fully by their working position, but not statistically significant by age, education, and the prior startup career. This research deliver the following significant implication that the active participation of CEO level, decision-maker guarantee the higher performance of the training program like QFD program, more stresses falling on practical implementation in real business rather than just ending up with career training. This study gives significant policy implication to quasi-government organization running all public startup training projects.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.393-407
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• 2015

This study is intended to look into the effects of small business startup environments on failure burden and startup failure. To achieve this, a survey was carried out to 300 small business CEOs in Seoul. The results were as follows. First, the effect of startup environments on failure burden showed that management environment, business environment, internal organizational environment and external organizational environment had a negative effect on failure burden. Second, the effect of startup environments on financial and non-financial losses showed that startup management environment, startup business environment and internal organizational environment had a negative effect on financial and non-financial losses. Third, the effect of failure burden on startup failure showed that failure burden had a positive effect on financial and non-financial losses. Consequently, this study indicates that internal organizational commitment and communication are important attributes affecting failure burden, financial and non-financial losses, compared with management quality, entrepreneurship and business environment.