• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.113-124
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• 2019

With the decline in the college student population and the increase in the youth unemployment rate, the university began to be interested in starting a business. Under the initiative of the government, the start-up support project was reflected in the university's educational programs, which led to the university students receiving various start-up support benefits. In response to the expansion of entrepreneurship education, various entrepreneurship education programs and support programs were applied in line with the government's efforts to start college students. As a result, students' entrepreneurial competence and willingness to start up increased. College student entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs are increasing. The increase of university student start-up companies is taking place in the entrepreneurial education environment within the university, and the support of university, community, and start-up support institutions for university student start-up, the starting point of the start-up ecosystem, is paying off. It can be seen that the youth entrepreneurship ecosystem based on university entrepreneurship education is in place. The university supports the entire business process from idea development, such as start-up classes, start-up club support, patent application support, prototype development support, and investment linkage. However, there is a university that develops and operates a unique program for each school and a university that does not. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an education program that can produce efficient results. The purpose of this study is to support the start-up program of the university to be the consumer-centered start-up support.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.151-163
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• 2021

Purpose - The break-even point refers to the point where total profit and total cost coincide, and from this point on, the entrepreneur's decision-making takes a different route. Strategic decisions can be made for more efficient operation and eventually for more likelihood for growth and sustainability if a startup figures out when it recoups the investment and switches to a net profit. Design/methodology/approach - 748 creativity and skill-based sole proprietors in manufacturing industry were examined to demonstrate the effect of the entrepreneur's entrepreneurial experience and education level, the business launch preparation time, or the self-financing on the achievement of break-even point. Findings - While the business launch preparation time lowered the likelihood of reaching a break-even point, self-financing increased the likelihood. As a result of further analysis by subdividing into subgroups according to skill level, only the business launch preparation time was statistically significant in the highly skilled industries. In the low skilled industries, in addition to the business launch preparation time, the CEO's education level and the self-financing were statistically significant. Research implications or Originality - The longer the business launch preparation time, the higher the start-up cost, which increases the burden of initial cost recovery, and the agile response to market changes is thereby delayed, resulting in the business idea losing its appeal. Self-financing not only provides stability and strong motivation for the business operation but also promotes careful spending which contributes to the achievement of break-even point. In particular, it is found that practical experience is more useful than theoretical knowledge in low skilled industries. Due to the limitation of secondary data based on the recollection, the time required to reach a break-even point, percentage of financing sources, etc. may include cognitive errors. In addition, variables are not included that explain the characteristics of creativity and skill-based sole proprietorship, so it is necessary to exercise caution with the actual application.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.53-69
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• 2019

Purpose - National scientific technology R&D investment is exceeding 60 trillion won per year, and the results of patent applications and technology transfers are visually improving. However, despite the improving research results of national R&D, the practical results of technology startups are mediocre. It is now time to expand the construction of the technology commercialization ecosystem, where the expansion of national R&D leads to the results of technology startups. Therefore, this study discussed the measures to increase the competitiveness of technology startups through the factual survey of the companies that benefitted from R&D support programs. Research design, data, and methodology - This study targeted 996 companies that benefitted from the R&D projects of the Technology Transfer Center for National R&D Programs, and deducted itemized issues through the survey replies. Survey questions were prepared to estimate the national R&D results, and the technology recognition path, the purpose of detailed introduction of the technology, investment of the commercialization fund, economic results, and the factors of success and failure were analyzed. Results - As for the recognition rate of technology during the process of corporate technology commercialization through the technology transfer, recognition through project participation showed a high response rate, and diverse implications of technology commercialization were deducted through the analysis of economic results. As for the resolution alternatives, the proliferation of technology commercialization platform that can create excellent technology for the companies in early stages and the measure of expanding the distribution of technology infrastructure were suggested. In this study, public technology commercialization strategy is established, and the innovative marketing strategy is presented. Conclusions - This study reveal that the result of creating scientific technology jobs should be deducted, in order to produce the revolutionary results of job creation by suggesting the success models of technology commercialization based on domestic scientific technology. In particular, even though the support systems for public research results are being diversely suggested, accurate studies on their actual conditions are currently lacking. Therefore, this study suggest realistic political alternatives to assure results in the process of public technology commercialization, by examining the current state of public research results of R&D support institutions and diagnosing the issues.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.17-29
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• 2020

In recent years, universities, with their intellectual properties and human resources, become main drivers for technology transfer. Universities in Korea have various organizations to support the technology transfer and commercialization. Among them, a technology holding company plays the critical role to successfully implement the task. Nonetheless, the performance of the technology holding company is well below the expectation of industry, government and universities themselves. The lack of expertises and experience together with the ill-suited government policies could be attributable to the observed under performance. More recently, however, the technology holding company acts as an accelerator or venture capital to search and fund promising start-ups. The university venture capital thus transforms a traditional university into an entrepreneurial university. Focusing on the role of the technology holding company as an accelerator or venture capital, the paper analyzes the characteristics of the university venture capital and the invested start-ups. The performance of the university venture capital is measured and the determinants of the performance are empirically tested. The results show that the co-investment of outside investors and the support of government program, known as Tech Incubator Program for Startup Korea, yields the highest performance. The result indicates that the coordination of the university venture capital, industry and government is the key to the success of early start-ups. The paper is the first to analyze the performance of the university venture capitals in Korea and thus contributes to the literature.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.135-152
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• 2019

Recently there are many development and support policies for start-up companies because of successful venture companies related to ICT services. However, as these policies have focused on the support for the initial stage of start-up, many start-up companies have difficulties to continuously grow up. The main reason for these difficulties is that they recognize start-up tasks as independent activities. However, many experts or related articles say that start-up tasks are composed of related processes from the initial stage to the stable stage of start-up firms. In this study, we models the start-up processes based on the survey collected by the start-up companies, and analyze the start-up process of ICT service companies with process mining techniques. Through process mining analysis, we can draw a sequential flow of tasks for start-ups and the characteristics of them. The analysis of start-up businessman, idea derivation, creating business model, business diversification processes are resulted as important processes, but marketing activity and managing investment funds are not. This result means that marketing activity and managing investment funds are activities that need ongoing attention. Moreover, we can find temporal and complementary tasks which could not be captured by independent individual-level activity analysis. Our process analysis results are expected to be used in simulation-based web-intelligent system to support start-up business, and more cumulated start-up business cases will be helpful to give more detailed individual-level personalization service. And our proposed process model and analyzing results can be used to solve many difficulties for start-up companies.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.41-55
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• 2023

In order to secure sustainable competitiveness of startups, business model innovation is an important task to achieve competitive advantage by transforming the various elements that make up the business model. This study conducted a multi-case analysis study on leading smart farm companies around the world using an analysis framework based on business model theory. Through this, we sought to identify business model types and their constituent elements. For this, 19 companies were selected from the list of top 10 investment startups of the year for the past three years published by Agfunder, a global investment research company specializing in AgTech. Then data collection and analysis of the company cases were conducted according to the case study protocol. As a result of the study, the business model types were analyzed into four types: large-scale centralized production model, medium-to-large local distributed production model, small-scale hyperlocal modular FaaS model, and small-scale hyperlocal turnkey solution supply model. A comparative analysis was conducted on five business model components for each type, and strategic implications were derived through this. This study is expected to contribute to improving the competitiveness of domestic smart farm startups and diversifying their strategies by identifying the business models of overseas leading companies in the smart farm field using an academic analysis framework.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.1-13
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• 2019

As a way to find new and innovative technologies, many companies have invested in and acquired skilled startups. Because startups are usually small in size and have a small history of past business experience, there are many risks involved in acquiring them as they have limited technical skills and business feasibility verification methods. Thus, venture capital plays an important role in discovering and investing competitive startups. While Independent Venture Capital generally values financial returns, Corporate Venture Capital, which plays investment roles in the firm, values business synergies with the parent company from a strategic perspective. In an industry sector where development of technology is rapid and whether new technology is held determines a company's competitiveness, existing companies incorporate startups with innovative technologies into their investment portfolios, collaborate together, and take over for comprehensive cooperation. In addition, new investments and acquisitions are carried out through the management of portfolio companies to obtain and utilize industry information. In this paper, major U.S. companies listed in the U.S. verified their investment activities through corporate venture capital and their impact on parent companies and startups through regression, while the parent company's acquisition performance was analyzed through an event study based on a stock price analysis. The criteria for startup were defined as companies with less than 12 years of experience, and the analysis showed that the parent companies with corporate venture capital with a larger number of investments actively take over startups. In addition, increasing corporate venture capital's financial investment activities shows a negative impact on the parent companies' acquisition activities, and the acquisition performance increased when the parent companies took over startups in its portfolio.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.67-83
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• 2023

The social venture start-up phenomenon is found from the perspectives of social enterprise and for-profit enterprise. This study aims to fundamentally explore the start-up phenomenon of social ventures from these two perspectives. Considering the lack of prior research that researched both social and commercial perspectives at the same time, this paper analyzed using grounded theory approach of Strauss & Corbin(1998), an inductive research method that analyzes based on prior research and interview data. In order to collect data for this study, eight corporate representatives currently operating social ventures were interviewed and data and phenomena were analyzed. This progressed to a theoretical saturation where no additional information was derived. The analysis results of this study using the grounded theory approach are as follows. As a result of open coding and axial coding, 147 concepts and 70 subcategories were derived, and 18 categories were derived through the final abstraction process. In the selective coding, 'expansion of social venture entry in the social domain' and 'expansion of social function of for-profit companies' were selected as key categories, and a story line was formed around this. In this study, we saw that it is necessary to conduct academic research and analysis on the competitive factors required for companies that pursue the values of two conflicting relationships, such as social ventures, to survive with competitiveness. In practice, concepts such as collaboration with for-profit companies, value combination, entrepreneurship competency and performance improvement, social value execution competency reinforcement, communication strategy, for-profit enterprise value investment, and entrepreneur management competency were derived. This study explains the social venture phenomenon for social enterprises, commercial enterprises, and entrepreneurs who want to enter the social venture field. It is expected to provide the implications necessary for successful social venture startups.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.25-37
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to survey startup founders within 7 years of founding the importance and satisfaction of the components of the scale-up entrepreneurial ecosystem at the national level in Korea and analyze the direction of scale-up policy by component using IPA (importance-performance analysis). Since the perception of founders, who are the subjects of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, affects the quantity and quality of start-ups, research is needed to analyze and diagnose the perception of scale-up components. For the development of the national economy and entrepreneurial ecosystem, companies that emerge from startups to scale-up and unicorns must be produced, and for this, elements for the scale-up entrepreneurial ecosystem are needed. The results of this study are as follows. First, the importance ranking of the components of the scale-up entrepreneurial ecosystem recognized by founders was in the order of "Financial support by growth stage," "Support for customized scale-up for enterprises," "Improvement of regulations," "Funds dedicated to scale-up," "large-scale investment," and "nurturing technical talents." Second, the factors that should be intensively improved in the importance-satisfaction matrix in the future were 'Pan-Government Integration Promotion Plan', 'Scale-Up Specialized Organization Operation', 'Company Customized Scale-Up Support', 'Regulatory Improvement', and 'Building a Korean Scale-Up Model'. As a result, various and large financial capital for the scale-up entrepreneurial ecosystem, diversification of scale-up programs by business sector, linkage of start-ups and scale-up support, deregulation of new technologies and new industries, strengthening corporate-tailored scale-up growth capabilities, and providing overseas networking opportunities can be derived. In addition, it is expected to contribute to policy practice and academic work with research that derives the components of the domestic scale-up entrepreneurial ecosystem and diagnoses its perception.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.69-77
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• 2014

Innopolis start-ups belong to the category of the research-based spin-offs, but in the meantime, has characteristics that separate them from the research-based spin-offs in terms of the process of technology commercialization. This study aims to assess the impacts of the foundation and management of the Innopolis start-ups in terms of expansion of entrepreneurship through entrepreneurial intention of researchers and economic achievements. A data set from 22 Innopolis start-ups and 200 researchers in 14 PRIs through door-to-door interviews and surveys is studied. Main findings are as follows: First, the foundation of the Innopolis start-up has a positive and strong impact on expansion of entrepreneurship through entrepreneurial intention of researchers. Second, technology transfer performance of researchers turns out to be major factor that affects entrepreneurial intention. Third, expansion of entrepreneurship, along with economic achievements characterized by sales, job creation and R&D investment, is a positive effect of the foundation and management of the Innopolis start-ups. The results of this paper provide an opportunity to test whether Innopolis start-up's strength in technology commercialization can be applied to actual management of the Innopolis startup and to examine the general direction in which the foundation and management of the Innopolis start-ups is heading.