• Journal of Venture Innovation
• /
• v.6 no.3
• /
• pp.1-20
• /
• 2023

This study conducted an empirical analysis of whether the accelerator incubation program (mentoring, seed investment) and entrepreneur self-efficacy affect competitive advantage performance for start-up representatives who have experienced the accelerator incubation program. At this time, the mediating effect of innovation capability was also examined. As for sample collection, 334 samples collected from representatives of start-ups nurtured by national accelerators and regional centers for creative economy and innovation in Korea were tested using the Smart PLS 4.0 program, and the analysis results are as follows. First, mentoring has no significant effect on competitive advantage performance, whereas seed investment and entrepreneur self-efficacy have a positive (+) effect on competitive advantage performance. Second, mentoring, seed investment, and entrepreneurial self-efficacy have a positive (+) effect on innovation capability. Third, innovation capability has a positive (+) effect on competitive advantage performance. And fourth, it was confirmed that innovation competency has a positive (+) effect between mentoring, seed investment, entrepreneurship self-efficacy and competitive advantage, and has a mediating effect. As a result, while mentoring did not have a direct significant effect on competitive advantage performance, it was confirmed that there was a significant effect mediated by innovation capability. Seed investment, entrepreneur self-efficacy, and innovation capability directly helped competitive advantage performance, and it was confirmed that innovation capability has an effect on the competitive advantage performance as a mediating effect. It is expected that this study will be able to suggest a direction that can help start-ups improve their competitive advantage performance.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
• /
• v.19 no.12
• /
• pp.281-289
• /
• 2021

This study aims to investigate the influence of the components of the startup ecosystem on the business performance of startups, focusing on the mediating effect of the location environment. By presenting the insight that the popularization of start-ups can be an alternative for job creation thanks to the government's start-up support policy considering the location environment, it is possible to construct an optimal configuration scenario between the components of the start-up ecosystem and the location environment. Furthermore, it is expected to contribute to the improvement of corporate management performance. To achieve this goal, we performed a survey and the subjects were domestic start-up company employees with less than 7 years of experience. The results show that the components of the start-up ecosystem had a significant effect on the business performance of start-up companies and the location environment and on the management performance of start-up companies according to the mediation of the location environment.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
• /
• v.14 no.3
• /
• pp.59-71
• /
• 2019

The domestic unemployment rate is now seriously increasing due to the impact of the international trend of incurring high costs using only a small number of manpower in a situation where the business has been being reduced in size. The nation is taking start-up promotion policies as a way to overcome the problem, but with the advent of excessive entrepreneurs and their concentration on specific areas, their survival is in an unclear situation. Thus, this study was intended to provide a useful direction for successful start-ups by identifying the impact of entrepreneurial motivation and entrepreneurship, internal characteristics of entrepreneurs, and of competency characteristics, external characteristics of them, on sustainability through business performance. Thus, the purpose of this study was to provide a useful direction for successful start-ups by identifying the impact of entrepreneurial motivation and entrepreneurship, internal characteristics of entrepreneurs, competency, and external characteristics, on sustainability through business performance. The result of verifying the hypothesis has showed that entrepreneurial motivation, entrepreneurship, and competency characteristics had a positive effect on business performance, and on the other hand, the business performance had a positive effect on sustainability. In addition, in terms of the impact of entrepreneurial motivation, entrepreneurship, and competency characteristics on sustainability, all of them had mediating effects on business performance. It is obvious that studies on the factors affecting business performance and corporate sustainability up to now have been carried out by only collecting the independent variables of this study individually or two of them. so it is judged that if the study, which has verified the practical direction in general through the verification of entrepreneurs's internal and external characteristics from various angles, is performed more comprehensively along with the addition of background characteristics of entrepreneurs, such as characteristics of start-up preparation, etc., in the future, more in-depth results will be able to be obtained.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
• /
• v.18 no.1
• /
• pp.125-140
• /
• 2023

Careful preparation for a start-up can lower the risk of failure and create a successful business model. However, there are still challenges for middle-aged entrepreneurs, as start-up services and policies are often not readily accessible or fully utilized. Despite active research on middle-aged start-ups, previous studies have not delved deeply into the demographics of start-up preparation and various preparation behaviors. In response to this, a study was conducted to identify which start-up support services middle-aged entrepreneurs use, and how start-up preparation can be classified based on this. Data from 324 middle-aged tech start-up owners, based in Seoul and who started their businesses within the past 7 years, was collected and analyzed. The results showed that middle-aged entrepreneurs had moderate start-up preparation, with the greatest focus on the preparation period and the least focus on start-up education. Latent Profile Analysis revealed three groups of start-up preparation types among middle-aged entrepreneurs: "Overall Tribal Type," "Lack of Start-up Education Type," and "Comprehensive Preparation Type." BCH was performed on start-up satisfaction, start-up competence, fear of failure, access to start-up services, and support needs for middle-aged entrepreneurs based on the preparation type. The results showed that "Overall Tribal Type" had statistically lower start-up satisfaction, competence, and service accessibility compared to the other groups. Meanwhile, "Comprehensive Preparation Type" had a statistically lower fear of failure than the other types. "Overall Tribal Type" also had lower accessibility to middle-aged start-up services. All types had a high recognition of the need for support for specialized middle-aged start-ups. The findings highlight the need for more comprehensive support for middle-aged entrepreneurs. This could include expanding support projects to enhance their level of preparation, providing customized support based on their level of preparation, and improving the visibility and accessibility of start-up support services for middle-aged individuals. Additionally, specialized education that addresses the characteristics of middle-aged individuals should be provided.

• Knowledge Management Research
• /
• v.25 no.1
• /
• pp.21-41
• /
• 2024

The global Industry has been shaped by start-ups that originated with knowledge-based innovative strategies or technologies in the 21st century. Specifically, laboratory start-ups that rely on research papers or patents for new technology development are recognized for their high survival rate and the creation of employment opportunities. Our study concentrated on 'I-Corps', which also introduced in Korea, standing for innovation corps is a laboratory startup program launched in 2011 by the NSF(National Research Foundation) to commercialize R&D results and foster entrepreneurship as part of the policy to build a start-up system at the national innovation level. In this study, we proposed and empirically tested a research model focusing on teams participating in the I-Corps program to determine how startup team diversity, among the team characteristics of laboratory startups, affected patent performance. As a result of the analysis, among the proposed variables, age diversity, educational background diversity, and value diversity had a significant impact on patent performance. The results of this study are expected to further strengthen the theoretical and practical foundations of researchers or practitioners of the I-Corps program, as well as related areas involving technology & laboratory startups, intellectual property and knowledge management fields in the future.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.15 no.5
• /
• pp.444-454
• /
• 2015

This study reports on initial founder performance and satisfaction that is affected by mentoring skills and mentoring functions. Through the empirical analysis, seen the initial founder performance and satisfaction as a respective dependent variable, this study intends to provide efficient direction of the responsibility mentor and present a method that enhances the survival of the initial start-up founder. The frequency analysis was conducted to determine the general characteristics of the sample, by leveraging the statistical package SPSS 20.0 for Windows program, details of the items measuring tools present a statistical analysis of sample data, 120 people have gathered in the survey data for this factor analysis was performed with a correlation to classify each region was calculated to Cronbach's ${\alpha}$ factor to determine the reliability of the measurement tool, and tested the hypothesis using linear regression analysis for verification. Was found to play an important role to draw the founder and mentor mentoring skills and capabilities in early stage start-ups, and conclusions drawn from this process. In particular, modeling of the mentor with a sound mind and behavior brought the better performance and satisfaction of the initial start-up founder. If a mentor provides mentoring with more interests in career development and psychosocial functions of the mentoring functions, it is seen to be more efficient way to improve survival rate of initial start-up as well as increasing a founder's performance and satisfaction.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
• /
• v.27 no.1
• /
• pp.79-92
• /
• 2022

This paper investigates the effects of R&D capability, manufacturing capability, understanding of the Biz model on performance of Korean start-up companies, especially the moderating effects of manufacturing capability and understanding of the Biz model. We analysis 1103 Korean start-up companies based on "2019 Survey of Korea Venture Firms" As a result, the manufacturing capability and employee's unnderstanding the Biz-model have the positive relationship with company performance. Especially, we found that 'employee's unnderstanding the Biz-model' moderates the relationship between R&D capability & performance positively.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
• /
• v.15 no.2
• /
• pp.47-65
• /
• 2020

With the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in sight, innovative business models utilizing new technologies are emerging, and startups are enjoying an abundance of opportunities based on the agility to respond to disruptive innovations and the opening to new technologies. However, what is most important in creating a sustainable start-up ecosystem is not the start-up itself, but the process of research-start-investment-investment-the leap to listing and big business-in order to build a virtuous circle of startups that leads to re-investment. To this end, the environment created in the hub area where start-ups were conducted is important, and these material and non-material environmental factors are described as being inclusive by the word "entrepreneurial ecosystem." This study aims to provide implications for Korea's entrepreneurial ecosystem through the study of the interaction of the elements that make up the start-up ecosystem and the relationship of ecosystem participants in Singapore. Singapore has been consistently mentioned as the top two Asian countries in assessing the start-up environment and business environment. In this process, six elements of the entrepreneurial ecosystem presented by Isenberg(2010)-policies, finance, culture, support, human resources, and market-are the best frameworks for analyzing entrepreneurial ecosystems in terms of well encompassing prior studies related to entrepreneurial ecosystem elements, and a model of regional transformation is formed focusing on some elements to suit Singapore, the target area of study. By considering that Singapore's political nature would inevitably have a huge impact on finance, Smart Nation policy was having an impact on university education related to entrepreneurship, and that the entrepreneurial networks and global connectivity formed within Singapore's start-up infrastructure had a significant impact on Singapore's start-up's performance, researches needed to look more at the factors of policy, culture and market. In addition, qualitative research of participants in the entrepreneurial ecosystem was essential to understand the internal interaction of the elements of the start-up ecosystem, so the semi-structured survey was conducted by visiting the site. As such, this study examined the status of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem based on qualitative research focused on policies, culture and market elements of Singapore's start-up ecosystem, and intended to provide implications for regulations related to start-ups, the role of universities and start-up infrastructure through comparison with Korea. This could contribute not only to the future research of the start-up ecosystem, but also to the creation of a start-up infrastructure, boosting the start-up ecosystem, and the establishment of the orientation of the start-up education in universities.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
• /
• v.15 no.3
• /
• pp.173-193
• /
• 2016

Start-ups do not have enough resources such as financial capital and established customer base. Knowledge base of start-up team members is the crucial and unrivaled resource. This study tries to explicate the knowledge sharing process occurring in this knowledge base of start-up teams. Adopting the knowledge process view, detail process of knowledge sharing process model is constructed consisting of knowledge sharing speed, quality and quantity in a form of nomological net and empirically tested. In addition, preceding antecedents and consequential outcomes of this knowledge sharing is also posited as part of the research model : knowledge state of the team leading to team creativity and agility via the explicated knowledge sharing process model. Also, as this knowledge based view are triggered by the advance of IT in general, IT support is conceptualized as an antecedent and measures are operationalized. 230 data points were collected from start-up teams. Via data analysis using PLS, theoretical relationships from knowledge state, IT support, knowledge sharing process and knowledge consequences are found to be empirically supported except a few not supported. Most of all, team agility and team creativity are theoretically supported and empirically validated as critical outcome variables beyond performance measures. Though agility and creativity has been discussed as critical construct in start-up teams, it has not be much validated empirically. Also, interestingly, IT support are found to be significantly impacting the knowledge sharing process as expected. Academic contributions and implications for practice are discussed at the end with limitations and further research.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
• /
• v.18 no.6
• /
• pp.27-40
• /
• 2023

This study analyzes the factors affecting the survival of young start-up companies. A youth start-up company was defined as a company with a founder's age under 39. The study was based on evaluation data from 3,540 companies evaluated by the Technology Guarantee Fund to support youth start-up guarantees during the period from 2012 to 2015. In this study, independent variables were defined as founder characteristics, start-up environment, and start-up strategy, and entrepreneurship, knowledge level, and development capabilities were set as variables for start-up characteristics, competition conditions and comparative advantage with alternatives in the start-up environment, and item novelty, commercialization plan and financing plan were set as variables. For variable measurement, the evaluation index of the youth start-up evaluation model of the Technology Guarantee Fund was used. Management performance was defined as the survival of a company, and the survival of 12, 36, 60, and 84 months was measured based on the occurrence of insolvency registered by the Korea Technology Guarantee Fund. The Cox proportional risk model was used for hypothesis testing. As a result of the analysis, knowledge level and development capability were statistically significant in the characteristics of the founder, and the financing plan in the start-up strategy was statistically significant regardless of the survival period. Among the start-up strategies, the novelty of the item had a positive effect on survival after 36 months. Entrepreneurship was significant only in 12-month survival. The most important order for survival was identified in the order of financing plan, knowledge level, item novelty and development capability, of which the founder's knowledge level in the beginning and the funding plan in the second half had the greatest impact.