• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.41-54
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• 2018

In recent years, as interest in youth startup has increased, the Korean government has established various policies to support young entrepreneurs and actively implements such policies. Especially, as a way to promote youth startup, the development of startup clubs in universities is being suggested, and the importance of startup clubs is growing day by day. As reflected in these points, the Korean government is increasing its budget every year to support the startup clubs of universities, and actively supports the funds and space required for the startup clubs of universities. Unfortunately, however, despite the growing importance of startup clubs and the active support of the government for the startup clubs, academic attempts to see how effectively the startup clubs are operating are not enough. For this reason, this study analyzes the effect of entrepreneurship of university start-up club members on the effectiveness of start-up club. More specifically, in this study, entrepreneurship of club members is classified as risk-taking propensity, proactiveness, and innovativeness, as emphasized in previous researches. We empirically analyzed the effects of these independent variables on the effectiveness of the start-up clubs, focusing on the moderating effect of club members' diversity. We conducted empirical analyses on 1112 start-up club members from 12 universities located in Jeollanam-do and Jeollabuk-do, and the analysis results are as follows. First, the entrepreneurship of the start-up club members, namely risk taking propensity, proactiveness and innovativeness, all have a positive effect on the effectiveness of the start-up club. These results are consistent with the emphasis of many previous studies. The higher the tendency to take risks, the more inclined to move forward through difficulties, and the higher the tendency to break out of the existing framework and pursue new things, suggesting that the effectiveness of the club is enhanced. Second, as a result of verifying the moderating effect of the club members' diversity, it was found that club members' diversity moderates the relationship between the proactiveness of club members and club effectiveness in the negative (-) direction. In other words, the positive effect of the entrepreneurship of club members on the effectiveness of the start-up club means that the proactiveness is weakened in the case of a club having members from different major backgrounds. The results of this study are expected to provide meaningful theoretical and practical implications by identifying the influencing factors of the start-up club's effectiveness, which has not received much attention so far.