• Korea Trade Review
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• v.47 no.6
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• pp.97-117
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• 2022

Amid the growing importance and growth potential of venture firms worldwide, this study aimed to figure out the effect of new product development capabilities (NPDC) on the internationalization of Korean venture firms and the moderating impact of founders' human capital. NPDC is a core competency that can cope with the rapidly changing market environment and is required when entering multinational markets. Therefore, we subdivided founders' human capital into professional experience, startup experience, education level, and marketing capacity and examined each moderating effect on a venture firm's internationalization. As a result of empirical analysis of 1,362 Korean venture firms using the Tobit model, this study found that venture firms with excellent NPDC tend to achieve a higher level of internationalization. In addition, among the founder's human capitals, professional experience, education level, and marketing competency moderated the positive relationship between NPDC and internationalization. In contrast, the founder's startup experience was insignificant. The results of this empirical analysis explain the factors that trigger the internationalization performance of venture firms from the perspective of dynamic capabilities and suggest that the founder's human capital played an essential role in the internationalization.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.23-31
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• 2024

The paper investigates the influence of government-led projects on investors' decision-making reference points, using Prospect Theory and Human Capital Theory. It empirically explores whether government initiatives shift investors' reference points, offering insights for private investments in government-backed ventures. The study, spanning from May 2017 to May 2022, compares 51 companies involved in Korea's 'New Deal' policy to 49 non-participating companies. It considers founders' human capital elements such as past startup experience, technical and managerial industry experience, education level, and graduate school reputation. The analysis reveals that only the reputation of the founder's graduate school has a significant negative effect, implying a conservative approach by investors towards government-led projects. This highlights the need for investors to consider the founder's social capital and the impact of government support on venture growth and public offering pace.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.173-189
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• 2023

As supreme technologies continue to be developed, industries such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robots, aerospace, electric vehicles, and solar energy are created, and the macro business environment is rapidly changing. Due to these large-scale changes and increased complexity, it is necessary to pay attention to the effect of social capital, which can create new value by utilizing capital increasing the importance of relationships rather than technology or asset ownership itself at the level of start-up strategy. Social capital is a concept first proposed by Hanifan in 1916, and refers to the overall sum of capabilities or resources that are latent or available for use in mutual, continuous, organic relationships or accumulated human relationship networks between individuals or social members. In addition, the diversity of start-up teams with diverse backgrounds, characteristics, and capabilities, rather than one exceptional founder, has been emphasized. Founding team diversity refers to the diversity of in-depth factors such as demographic factors, beliefs, and values of the founding team. In addition, changes in the macro environment are emphasizing the importance of technology start-ups and laboratory start-ups that lead industrial innovation and create the nation's core growth engines. This study focused on the I-Corps' program. I-Corps, which means innovation corps, is a laboratory startup program launched by the National Research Foundation (NSF) in 2011 to encourage entrepreneurship and commercialization of research results. It focuses on forming a startup team involving professors, researchers and market discovery activities. Taking these characteristics into account, this study empirically verified the impact of social capital from a network perspective and founding team diversity on I-Corps start-up performance. As a result of the analysis, the educational diversity of the founding team had a negative (-) effect on the financial performance of the founding team. On the other side, the gender diversity and the cognitive dimension of social capital had a positive (+) effect on the financial performance of the founding team. This study is expected to provide more useful theoretical and practical implications regarding the diversity, social capital, and performance interpretation of the I-Corps Lab startup team.