• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.185-193
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• 2015

This paper is brought to introduce best practice case of promoting startup raising seed investment out of university startup program. In specific, Innopolise Startup Item Market Validation Program running in Hanbat National University have shown the appropriate way of cooperating between experts in university and early stage venture investors in incubating and accelerating promising startup for last three years. This paper shall be expected to provide benchmaking ground of helping other similar project teams and core networking points of future cooperation among similar entities.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.13-35
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• 2020

Startup accelerators are a new type of investors providing a certain amount of shares for imparting education, mentoring, networking, and providing space and seed money that can directly resolve the difficulties faced by nascent entrepreneurs (Clarysse, 2016). Startup accelerators have expanded worldwide as their influence over the startup ecosystem has increasingly been established (Pauwels et al., 2016; Cohen & Hochberg, 2014). This study was conducted to derive investment determinants of startup accelerators that are emerging as major investment players around the world. To this end, the accelerator-type determinants of investment were derived. As previous research on this topic is nonexistent, this process involved qualitative meta-synthesis, literature reviews, observation, and in-depth interviews. First, more than 30 research papers were examined for the determinants of investment for firms at an early stage of their foundation, and the categories and determinants of investment in the relevant studies were comparatively analyzed using qualitative meta-synthesis. Further, related data were investigated to identify the characteristics of accelerators, and the startup evaluation process of US accelerators was studied. The more than 100 questions raised during this process were coded to examine the determinants of investment that accelerators considered important. In-depth interviews were conducted with four US accelerators to identify the characteristics of accelerators and key determinants of investment. Ultimately, 5 categories of accelerator-type determinants of investment and 26 subordinate determinants of investment were derived. The results were verified and supplemented by consulting with seven accelerators in Korea. The results were confirmed after pilot tests and verification by seven domestic accelerators. After confirming the accelerator-type determinants, the reliability of them was verified by examining the importance and priority of each category through the quantitative survey of Korean accelerators. The research that elicited the accelerator-type investment determinants is the first research and is expected to be a major reference to the progress of subsequent studies. This research that systematically derived the investment determinants of the accelerator is expected to make major contributions to the progress of follow-up studies, the process of selecting startups, and the investment decision-making process of the accelerators.

• Asian Journal of Innovation and Policy
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.178-189
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• 2018

In this paper, we present a case study of a new emerging business startup involved in smart house appliances. The irreversible investment concept and real-option theory are introduced as the fundamentals of the model. By using games theory we show that the startup's actions can trigger reactions from other firms. The first part covers initial the research and development stage, while the second part covers production and commercialization. The findings of this study suggest that, given a certain amount of initial investment, an open and shared innovation may lead to hurting a firm's investment while strengthening the competitors' position in the market. However, given the sensitivity analysis, when volatility and demand grow favorably, sharing R&D investment is not a bad option for a new player to adjust its position in the market while still maintaining positive returns.

• Asian Journal of Innovation and Policy
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.129-145
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• 2016

This is a case study to analyze the role of technology licensing or transfer office (TLO) as factors of success for the spin-off from government research lab. The case company is a research lab startup, which is a joint venture through technology investment by a government research lab or university in the designated R&D parks and cash investment by the partner company. The case company listed on the stock market in 2015 reaching a market capitalization of US$ 1.2 billion. We confirm the success factors of startups pointed out in many studies: original technology, good understanding of core technology and production technology, technological competitiveness in the market. However, there is an important factor not well discussed in the previous studies, the role of TLO. TLO guided the company ownership, management, technology, and solved problems that pause business itself. The case became the sample of research lab startup and technology investment in Korea.

• Korean small business review
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.187-219
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• 2021

Startup accelerators, a new type of investment entity, have emerged as a way to solve the difficulties of early startups and existing investment methods with high risk. With the visible performances of these startup accelerators on the success of startups, medium and large accelerator companies have emerged, along with the increasing size of seed money they invest in. In addition, differences between small and medium&large accelerator companies are emerging. Therefore, startups need informations on what factors to prepare for attracting startup accelerators' investment. Accelerators also need determinant criteria to select startups as the amount of investment grows. However, the study on this subject is not currently being conducted. Therefore, we conducted the study through dividing the average amount of seed money into small and medium & large-sized investment groups and examined the differences in major investment determinants, investment purposes, and major accelerating programs. As the results of this study, small investment groups could be subdivided into 'consulting-oriented accelerators' and medium- and large-sized investment groups into 'investment-oriented accelerators'. In addition, major services and investment purposes and investment decision criteria vary depending on the size of the investment. I think these findings will be good standards for accelerator companies, startups in need of their help, and follow-up researchers.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.109-121
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• 2023

This paper examines whether angel investors affect startup's financial performance (profitability and growth ratios) in the Korean startup market over 10 years period from 2009 to 2018. In particular, we consider not only the behavior of angel investor such as the investment amount or the type of investments (stocks, bonds) but also the type of angle investor (individual or corporation). Our empirical results are as follows. First, we find that the startup's profitability ratios are higher after the investment of angel investors. However, the growth ratios show different results in assets and sales. Second, we identify that the investment amount of angel investors negatively affects on the startup's growth ratios. Lastly, we find that equity investment such as common stock or preferred stock and the individual angel investors such as personal investment association or professional angels show higher financial performance than bond investment or corporate angel investors. Overall, our findings imply that angel investors positively affect startup's financial performance. In particular, we infer that the superior financial performance is largely attributed to monitor startups by participating as shareholders or to select more carefully by the individual angel investors who may be exposed to more investment risk. In conclusion, our findings support that angel investors play a positive role in the Korean venture investment market.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.27-42
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• 2020

Startup accelerators have emerged as new investment entities that help early startups, which are not easy to survive continuously due to lack of funds, commercialization capabilities, and experiences. As their positive performance on early startups and the ecosystem has been proven, the number of early startups which want to receive their investment is also increasing. However, they are vaguely preparing to attract accelerators' investment because they do not have any information on what factors the accelerators consider important. In addition, researches on startup accelerators are also at an early level, so there are no remarkable prior studies on factors that decide on investment. Therefore, this study aims to help startups prepare for investment attraction by looking at what factors are important for accelerators to invest, and to provide meaningful implications to academia. In the preceding study, we derived five upper level categories, 26 lower level accelerators' investment determinants through the qualitative meta-synthesis method, secondary data analysis, observation on US accelerators and in-depth interviews. In this study, we want to derive important implications by deriving priorities of the accelerators' investment determinants. Therefore, we used AHP that are evaluated as the suitable methodology for deriving importance and priority. The analysis results show that accelerators value market-related factors most. This means that startups that are subject to investment by accelerators are early-stage startups, and many companies have not fully developed their products or services. Therefore, market-related factors that can be evaluated objectively seem to be more important than products (or services) that are still ambiguous. Next, it was found that the factors related to the internal workforce of startups are more important. Since accelerators want to develop their businesses together with start-ups and team members through mentoring, ease of collaboration with them is very important, which seems to be important. The overall priority analysis results of the 26 investment determinants show that 'customer needs' and 'founders and team members' understanding of customers and markets' (0.62) are important and high priority factors. The results also show that startup accelerators consider the customer-centered perspective very important. And among the factors related to startups, the most prominent factor was the founder's openness and execution ability. Therefore, it can be confirmed that accelerators consider the ease of collaboration with these startups very important.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.39-47
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• 2015

"Series A Crunch"problem has become worse off as funding gap between angel seed investment and traditional VC Series A investment is getting the larger due to big boom over early startup investment both in Korea and US. The strong needs for new concept of fund alternative such as bridge fund is outstanding to fill up the funding gap in the early stage of venture investment. This research is brought to define the concept of 'Series A Crunch' problem and to diagnose its causes, eventually, popping up 'the concept of Micro VC Fund' to come up with this problem in Korea. Also, this paper suggests the policy alternatives to introduce Mivro VC Fund and accommodate its successful performance.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.63-73
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• 2016

In these days startup became one of the most hot issue in business world. The problem is many startup couldn't overcome the valley of death. For this reason many startup want to funded by venture capital. However startup's business is trade secret itself, so they have to make strategic approach to venture capital. The purpose of study is to find the way to make strategic decision for startup. By analyzing the relation between startup's characteristic and venture capital's investment portfolio. Four famous venture capital(Sequoia capital, Lightspeed venture, Firstround and Khosla venture) and their seed invested startup Dropbox, Airbnb, Snapchat, Uber and Instacart was selected for this study. As a result, each venture capital has their own invest category characteristic and their seed funding belong to their category. Moreover, between seed funded startup and 36,4% of 244 past invented company shown vertical relationship, beside 0.5% of past 244 invested company shown horizontal relationship. This result shown the importance of the relation between startup's characteristic and venture capital's portfolio. Startup have to check the venture capital's portfolio for the strategic approach for funding and venture capital have to make mutual positive portfolio for decreasing the risk.

• Electronics and Telecommunications Trends
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.1-10
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• 2022

Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly diffused across industries and societies as nations' essential strategic technology. In innovative technology, such as AI, a startup leads to technological innovation and significantly impacts the expansion of relevant industries. Thus, this study examined the trend of AI startup venture capital (VC) investments globally, focusing on ① noteworthy VC investment statuses (the number and size of the investment, company establishment, and corporate collection), ② the characteristics of each key nation's investments, and ③ the characteristics of each submarket's investments. Among the 11 countries, the results showed that Korea ranked near the bottom for absolute quantitative measures, including the number and size of investments, company establishment, and corporate collection. However, Korea has built a foundation of catching up with what AI-leading countries have established, considering Korea's high growth rate in the number and size of investments and a recent mega-round. This study has practical implications in that it determined the AI startup VC investment status of Korea's rival countries, not only G2 (US and China). The results can be used in policy-making. Furthermore, identifying the AI industry's submarkets and analyzing each market's VC investment status could be used to establish strategies for the AI industry and R&D.