• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.33-43
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• 2023

The paper employs a resource-based approach to analyze the relationship between institutional resources and faculty-led startup formation and performance in South Korean four-year universities from 2017 to 2021. The author proposes nine hypotheses to explain how institutional resources or systems affect the number of faculty startups, their employee numbers and the revenue of faculty-led startups, and compare four different groups of university resources for cross-college variation. The findings suggest that institutional factors impacting faculty-led startup performance differ from those impacting other categories of startups. Universities should provide a more favorable environment, including flexible personnel policies and accompanying startup support infrastructure, to encourage faculty-led startups. In contrast, it is more effective for better performance of faculty startups, in terms of their job creation and revenue, to have more financial resources and good paper publications. The results also suggest that university technology-holding companies are crucial for increasing the number of professor startups and their performance. These findings have implications for both university and government policymakers, who aim to facilitate greater participation of professors in startup formation and commercialization of technology.