• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.31-47
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• 2022

The TIPS, a representative public-private cooperative project to revitalize the start-up ecosystem, is a government supported policy that promotes successful commercialization through various start-up support for technology-based startups. The purpose of this study is to analyze the investment decision factors of the TIPS program and to derive priorities. In order to achieve the research purpose, first, the investment decision factors were derived through literature analysis, a Delphi surveys were conducted on investors and experts participating in the evaluation of the TIPS program, and an AHP analysis was conducted on 20 VCs to empirically analyze the priority of factors on investment decisions. As a result of the analysis, the importance of critical factors was confirmed in the order of entrepreneurs(team) > market > product/service > finance > network. The importance of detailed factors was found in the order of entrepreneur's reliability and authenticity > market growth and scalability > team members' expertise and capabilities > adequacy of current market size > new market creation. This study presented the capabilities of technology-based startups preparing to participate in the TIPS program by deriving factors that influence investment decisions from an investor's perspective and comparing and analyzing the importance. It is also meaningful that basic data on determinants of private-led investment decision-making were presented to stake-holders such as venture capital, accelerator, and start-up support institutions.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.193-207
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• 2024

Purpose - With the increase of non-face-to-face activities due to the spread of COVID-19, O2O industry has grown rapidly which reduces contact points between suppliers and consumers. O2O platform is now recognized as an indispensable channel of distribution, but the voice is getting louder that it is necessary to check how it contributes to the performance of suppliers or how its fee system or contract terms affects the expansion of O2O industry as the leading companies tend to monopolize the market. Design/methodology/approach - In this study, the scope was limited to the restaurant industry in which transactions are the most active among the O2O industry and a regression analysis was done on 775 businesses that had used guarantor service from the Seoul Credit Guarantee Foundation. Findings - Analysis on the impact of O2O platform system, information, and service quality on the business performance of the sole proprietors revealed that the system quality represented by ease of use and the information quality determined by level of timely, accurate and reliable information provided to the consumers have a statistically significant effect on the improvement of business performance. In addition, the effect of business performance on the loyalty measured by the likelihood of users continuing to use the service as well as recommending it to others was moderated by the satisfaction with contract terms, not by the fee system. Research implications or Originality - Although the number of O2O platform providers has increased manyfold, the membership rate is no more than 20%, which means that the small business owners are still struggling with digital transformation. In order for the O2O industry, which is now commonplace, to form a healthy ecosystem that satisfies both suppliers and consumers, the standard contract guidelines that are acceptable to both parties must be established and the O2O providers must offer services that help suppliers to improve performance.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.151-160
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• 2020

This study aims to figure out the status of university start-up education and support scheme, which are becoming more important as a major project of recent university policy, and to present policy tasks for promoting university start-ups by analyzing problems. A survey on education and support scheme about start-up was carried out from 800 students including those on leave of absence at D university located in metropolitan area and the analysis results are as follows. First, perception about start-up was highly positive due to various start-up education and support scheme from universities, but it was surveyed that university students have still low willingness to challenge start-up. Second, the biggest reason why university students avoid the start-up is 'the risk of start-up failure' at 40.8%, followed by 'Prioritizing getting a job' at 24.9% and 'lack of knowledge on start-up' at 13.4%. Also, difficulty from those who have already started business was mainly financing at 26.9%. The second was 14.0% for securing manpower, and the third was 11.8% for technology development. Third, the necessity of start-up education was in the order of 'starting-up' > 'preparing to start-up' > 'no intention to start-up'. The reason for the necessity of start-up education was 'motivation for various career choices' with 24.8%, followed by 'acquisition of various knowledge and skills for start-up' with 23.9%. Finally, efforts are needed to understand the importance of public relations for start-up policies in universities and figure out the problems of the start-up support scheme. The start-up education and support scheme should reflect the needs of university students, who are actual policy consumers, by shifting away from the method provided by existing suppliers.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.137-150
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• 2015

This study investigated the influence of Entrepreneurship, Start-up Competency on Entrepreneurial Satisfaction and the moderating effect of Flow experience. The goal of this investigation is to empirically prove that despite the benefits of educational and financial support, mentoring and consulting which selected applicants received as a part of supporting business for start-up companies provided by national and local government and public organizations, there is a gap between individual entrepreneurs' satisfaction after actual foundation of the company. For the purpose of this investigation, data was collected through a survey with 320 entrepreneurs who were beneficiaries of government's supporting business for start-up companies and have founded their companies less than 5 years ago. For entrepreneurship variables, three factors of innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking were reviewed, and also reviewed the three variables network capability, market orientation and marketing capacity as Start-up competency. The collected data was used to perform a multiple regression analysis, and the moderating effect of flow experience was analysed using moderated regression analysis. The result of analysis shows that innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking of entrepreneurship positively affected the entrepreneurial satisfaction, and network capability, market orientation and marketing capability also positively affected the entrepreneurial satisfaction. As a result of analysing the moderating effect of flow experience, it appeared that there is a positive moderating effect between entrepreneurship, start-up competency, and the entrepreneurial satisfaction. This result concludes that evaluation items of entrepreneurship and start-up competency as applicant selecting criteria in supporting business for start-up companies, are valid. It is also concluded that start-up supports such as education, funds and consulting are also important, but it is necessary to make changes such as construction of start-up ecosystem and reinforcement of networking support, so that entrepreneurs can have the flow experience themselves in the process after founding a company.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.131-144
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• 2021

The organizational ambidexterity is an organizational strategy designed to pursue exploration activities to seize new opportunities and exploitation activities to efficiently use resources. Most of these ambidextrous structures have been studied for large corporations with slack resources, and there are still not many studies on the necessity of an ambidextrous structure for startups with relatively low-level resources. However, recently, the startup ecosystem is being advanced globally, and the amount of VC investment is rapidly increasing. This is a time when a lot of venture fund is invested in startups and a startup-friendly environment for rapid growth is created. This is the time to discuss the necessity and applicability of an ambidextrous organizational structure for startups. Therefore, this study conducted a hypothesis test whether the importance and necessity of balance that startups solving market problems with new ideas and utilizing accumulated resources have. To conduct this study, we analyzed 140 startups data gathered from the survey and the moderation effect was also analyzed. As a result of the study, it was verified that the balance of startup exploration and exploitation had a significant effect on startup performance, and the moderating effect of environmental dynamics was found to have a significant effect on the relationship with non-financial performance. Therefore, for startups with insufficient resources, it was concluded that the surplus resources generated in the process of a firm's growth should be effectively utilized and the balance between exploration and exploitation should be balanced from the initial stage of searching for a new business. In other words, it was confirmed that it is important for continuous growth and survival to seek the structure of an ambidextrous organization in order to internalize a mechanism that enables startups to pursue both effectiveness and efficiency in the long term. This study suggests a strategic direction for the growth of startups from the perspective of organizational structure. We expect that this meaningful results on the relationship between the ambidextrous capabilities of startups and performance contribute to the growth of startups in the rapidly growing startup venture environment.

• Journal of Venture Innovation
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.41-65
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• 2023

This study was conducted to empirically analyse the factors that influence SMEs' intention to adopt ESG. For this purpose, we first derived the variables of usefulness of ESG and ease of adoption. In addition, we adopted CEO's will because of the importance of CEO's role in decision-making in SMEs. In addition, we added customer's request, government support, and credit evaluation reflection as institutional factors for ESG management. To examine the mediating role of attitudes and employees' innovation resistance in these relationships and how they affect ESG adoption, we set up a research model. These factors were used in the empirical analysis with 368 valid responses from the survey. Hierarchical regression analysis method using SPSS 24.0 was used for statistical analysis, and Process Macro 4.0 based on SPSS 24 was used for mediation and moderation effects. The results of the empirical analysis of this study showed that the usefulness of ESG adoption, ease of adoption, CEO's will, customer's request, government support, and credit evaluation reflection all had a positive and significant effect on the intention to adopt ESG management. In particular, among the variables affecting ESG adoption, CEO's will was found to be the most influential. Attitudes were also found to play a mediating role between the influencing factors and intention to adopt ESG management, as well as the mediating effect of employee' innovation resistance. The academic implications of this study include the identification and empirical testing of each of the influencing variables of ESG management adoption in the scarce literature on ESG in SMEs, and the prioritisation of the influence of these factors on adoption intention, which can be used to promote the adoption of ESG management. In terms of practical implications, it is important for SMEs to have a win-win relationship with large corporations, an ecosystem such as government support, in order to improve CEO awareness and motivate the CEO's will, and for smooth introduction of ESG management, it is necessary to find ways to reduce resistance through sufficient communication with organizational members to make them aware of the need.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.55-73
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• 2024

Unicorn companies are attracting attention around the world as they are recognized for their high corporate value in a short period of time as an innovative business models. Their growth process presents good lessons for the startup ecosystem and have a positive impact on national economic development and job creation. However, previous studies related to unicorn companies are focused on 'event studies' and 'case studies' such as characteristics of founders, environmental factors, business models and success/failure cases of companies already recognized as unicorns rather than a multifaceted approach. The occurrence of unicorn companies and Macroscopic analysis of related factors is lacking. Against this background, this study are considering the characteristics of unicorns examined through previous research and the current status unicorns with a high proportion of technology companies, the purpose was to analyze the impact of the country's technological competitiveness, such as 'technology human resource index', 'R&D index', and 'technology infrastructure index', on the increase in unicorn companies. For statistical analysis, data published by various international organizations, the Bank of Korea, and Statistics Korea from 2017 to 2020 and unicorn company data compiled by CB Insights were used as panel data for 44 countries to be tested by multiple regression analysis. As a result of the study, it was confirmed that the number of science majors had a positive (+) effect on the increase of unicorn companies in the case of technology human resource index, and in the case of R&D index, the total amount of R&D investment had a positive (+) effect on the increase of unicorn companies, while the number of Triad Patents Families and the number of scientific and technological papers published had a negative (-) effect on the increase of unicorn companies. Finally, in the case of technology infrastructure index, it was confirmed that the number of the world's 500th-ranked universities had a positive (+) effect on the increase of unicorn companies. This study is the first to reveal the causal relationship between national technological competitiveness and unicorn company growth based on country-specific and time-series empirical data, which were insufficiently covered in previous studies. and compared to the UN's ranking of the global industrial competitiveness index and the OECD's total R&D investment by country, Korea is considered to have technological and growth potential, while the number of unicorn companies driving growth as leaders of the innovative economy is relatively small, so the research results can be used when establishing policies to discover and foster unicorn companies in the future.

• Journal of Venture Innovation
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.45-63
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• 2024

The success of a company in the market is linked to the value it delivers to its customers. However, that value is not always constant. As the environment changes, so do customer experiences and requirements, and eventually the value they seek also evolves. Thus, a timely, clear, and effective value proposition, along with the associated benefits, becomes the functional, psychological, and economic foundation of a business. Therefore, the customer value proposition is crucial in terms of Product-Market Fit (PMF), establishing competitive differentiation, and delivering consistent messaging. Despite this, the most widely known and utilized model related to the Customer Value Proposition (CVP) in general businesses is the Value Proposition Canvas (VPC) by Osterwalder and Pigneur. Apart from that, there are only a few other models used by scholars and experts. In this paper, I selected the VPC model, which is widely used by business practitioners globally, and two other major CVP models well-known to experts. I conducted a detailed analysis of these models and derived the essential elements and key features of a customer value proposition. These were then combined with the Lean Startup methodology, which is frequently used for innovation today, to design an integrated CVP model that startups can easily utilize. The framework proposed in this study is a comprehensive CVP model that incorporates the strengths, weaknesses, characteristics, and commonalities of the three existing CVP models. It is designed to flexibly adapt depending on the business direction or strategic characteristics of the company by comprehensively considering all circumstances of the entire company or a specific product/service. Additionally, it systematically manages the contents of customers' wants & needs, strategic focus, and growth horizons, even after application. The Integrative-Lean CVP Model, designed for easy use by startups, is expected to help them with limited funding and marketing capabilities identify value proposition elements for timely PMF, fostering the creation of a new startup ecosystem.

• Journal of Venture Innovation
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.183-228
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• 2024

This study aimed to develop a competency evaluation scale tailored to the specific needs of key talent in the ICT startup sector. Existing competency assessment tools are mostly designed for environments in large corporations or traditional small and medium-sized enterprises, failing to adequately reflect the dynamic requirements of rapidly evolving startups. For startups, where a small number of individuals directly impact company success, key talent is a critical asset. Accordingly, this study sought to create a scale that measures the competencies suited to the challenges and opportunities faced by startups, helping domestic startups establish more effective talent management strategies. The research initially selected 71 items through a literature review and in-depth interviews. Based on expert feedback that emphasized the need for more precise and clear descriptions, the item descriptions were revised, and a total of 65 items were developed through four rounds of content validation. Following preliminary and main surveys, a final set of 58 items was developed. The main survey conducted further factor analysis based on the three broad competency factors?knowledge, skills, and attitude?identified in the preliminary survey. As a result, 10 latent factors emerged: 6 items for task comprehension, 6 items for practical experience (tacit knowledge), 6 items for collaboration, 9 items for management and problem-solving, 9 items for practical skills, 4 items for self-direction, 5 items for goal orientation, 5 items for adaptability, 5 items for relationship orientation, and 3 items for organizational loyalty. The developed scale comprehensively covers the multifaceted nature of competencies, allowing for a thorough evaluation of essential skills such as technical ability, teamwork, innovation, and leadership, which are critical for startups. Therefore, the scale provides a tool that helps startup managers objectively and accurately assess candidates' competencies. It also supports the growth of employees within startups, maximizing the overall organizational performance. By utilizing this tool, startups can build a strong internal talent pool and continuously enhance employees' competencies, thereby strengthening organizational competitiveness. In conclusion, the competency evaluation scale developed in this study is a customized tool that aligns with the characteristics of startups and plays a crucial role in securing sustainable competitiveness in rapidly changing market environments. Additionally, it offers practical guidance to support the successful growth of domestic startups and help them maintain their competitive edge in the market, contributing to the development of the startup ecosystem and the growth of the national economy.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.315-338
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• 2022

In 1986, Korea established legal systems to support small and medium-sized start-ups, which becomes the main pillars of national development. The legal systems have stimulated start-up ecosystems to have more than 1 million new start-up companies founded every year during the past 30 years. To analyze the trend of Korea's start-up ecosystem, in this study, we collected 1.18 million news articles from 1991 to 2020. Then, we extracted news articles that have the keywords "start-up", "venture", and "start-up". We employed network analysis and topic modeling to analyze collected news articles. Our analysis can contribute to analyzing the government policy direction shown in the history of start-up support policy. Specifically, our analysis identifies the dynamic characteristics of government influenced by external environmental factors (e.g., society, economy, and culture). The results of our analysis suggest that the start-up ecosystems in Korea have changed and developed mainly by the government policies for corporation governance, industrial development planning, deregulation, and economic prosperity plan. Our frequency keyword analysis contributes to understanding entrepreneurial productivity attributed to activities among the networked components in industrial ecosystems. Our analyses and results provide practitioners and researchers with practical and academic implications that can help to establish dedicated support policies through forecast tasks of the economic environment surrounding the start-ups. Korean entrepreneurial productivity has been empowered by growing numbers of large companies in the mobile phone industry. The spectrum of large companies incorporates content startups, platform providers, online shopping malls, and youth-oriented start-ups. In addition, economic situational factors contribute to the growth of Korean entrepreneurial productivity the economic, which are related to the global expansions of the mobile industry, and government efforts to foster start-ups. Our research is methodologically implicative. We employ natural language processes for 30 years of media articles, which enables more rigorous analysis compared to the existing studies which only observe changes in government and policy based on a qualitative manner.