• 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.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.17 no.8
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• pp.81-88
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• 2019

This study suggests the ways to promote the technology startups founded by professor, who differs from student or researcher in social status, risk-taking tendency, and motivation. Literatures were reviewed to understand the advantage of faculty's tech start-up, foreign cases, and related researches. In addition, key stakeholders were interviewed. The study shows that domestic faculty entrepreneurship is currently in infant stage while facing obstacles in institutional, financial and practical aspects. In order to promote faculty entrepreneurship, the study suggests that university and professor set up the benefit sharing structure in advance, that the public sector establishes a holding company or investment fund dedicated to support a faculty startup, that proactive effort be made to attract passive professors to the startup world, and that private companies join faculty startups in the process of concept proofing and product commercialization. The study is expected to provide government, university, and industry with practical implication in promoting faculty startup.

• 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.