• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.35-48
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• 2018

This study aims to assess the training effect of QFD(Quality Functional Deployment) program for 3 years over startups, adopted from the conventional QFD widely used in the large companies to break up to a sluggish sales and growth, for employees working in startup whether the participants in startup and venture company taking this lessons into their real tasks or not. In particular, the focus of this study falls on figuring out whether individual characteristics of the participants play a role in moderating effect over transfer intension factors and its link path structure. The research results drive out two significant findings. First, in terms of relationship between the influence of transfer intension by self-efficacy and the validity of training content with the learner's readiness, the moderating effect of demographic features of the participants is effective partially by the sex and fully by their working position, but not statistically significant by age, education, and the prior startup career. This research deliver the following significant implication that the active participation of CEO level, decision-maker guarantee the higher performance of the training program like QFD program, more stresses falling on practical implementation in real business rather than just ending up with career training. This study gives significant policy implication to quasi-government organization running all public startup training projects.

• 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.16 no.4
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• pp.1-24
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• 2021

The Korean government is currently expanding the business startup incubator support program and funds for new ventures with innovative technology in order to spread the second venture boom. However, despite the fact that entrepreneurial education and mentoring that entrepreneurs should have are important parts for the sustainable growth of the startup, some companies selected for government support programs are reluctant to participate in programs such as entrepreneurship education and mentoring for the sole purpose of funding commercialization. This research addressed the effects of entrepreneurial alertness with opportunity awareness as its medium and the small business mentoring service along with the number of times the mentoring has taken place, on the corporate performances. The results of empirical research are as follow: the first one is that scanning-search and evaluation-judgment can influence a company's performance (financial, non-financial) through opportunity recognition, with the exception of association-connection, which is a sub-factor of entrepreneurial alertness. Secondly, it was found to affect a company's financial and non-financial performance through opportunity recognition for financing mentoring, technical support mentoring, and management support mentoring. Thirdly, it was found that the number of mentoring also affects the financial and non-financial performance of a company through opportunity recognition. The implications of this study are that it should be revisited that program managers consider rooms that do not violate the startup founder's strategic decision-making opportunities when designing and operating the program as entrepreneurial alertness sub-factor association-connection does not affect corporate performance through opportunity recognition. This study also emphasizes the need for customized mentoring to meet the outcome goals of each startup, as it has been empirically clarified that the mentoring provided to the startup by the government's support is important. The contribution of this research is that entrepreneurial alertness and opportunity recognition that are treated as important components in research for entrepreneurship, and the factors of mentoring and mentoring frequency that are recognized as important elements in the practical aspect of startup business are clarified theoretically and empirically as an influential factor in corporate performance. And this study also provide a rationale for the startup business support agency supplying mentoring.

• Journal of Venture Innovation
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.1-18
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• 2022

There is growing empirical evidence that passion is an important part of entrepreneurship and influences the intentions, behaviors and performance of entrepreneurs, employees and startups. Passion is especially important in an entrepreneurial context, given the effort and challenge that entrepreneurs starting a startup must overcome. The purpose of this study was to confirm the effect of the passion of startup entrepreneurs participating in the accelerator incubation program and the passion of accelerator entrepreneurs and managers on the entrepreneurial performance of incubator startups. In addition, we tried to confirm whether entrepreneurial self-efficacy plays a mediating role in this influence relationship. The survey was conducted online by startups entrepreneur who completed the accelerator incubation program. A total of 330 questionnaires were used for the analysis. As a result of the empirical analysis, it was confirmed that the passion of startup entrepreneurs and the passion of accelerator entrepreneurs and managers all had a positive (+) effect on the entrepreneurial performance of incubator startups. The influence of passion was found to be high in the order of startup entrepreneurs, accelerator entrepreneurs, and accelerator managers. It was confirmed that entrepreneurial self-efficacy plays a mediating role between the passion of startup entrepreneurs, the passion of accelerator entrepreneurs, and the entrepreneurial performance of incubator startups, respectively. However, no significant mediating role was identified between the passion of accelerator managers and the entrepreneurial performance of incubator startups. This study is significant in empirically confirming for the first time that the passion of accelerator entrepreneurs and managers has a positive effect on the entrepreneurial performance of incubator startups. The passion of accelerator entrepreneurs and managers is playing an important role as a hidden lynchpin in creating the entrepreneurial performance of incubator startups. In particular, since the passion of accelerator entrepreneurs has a great influence on the performance of incubator startups, it is necessary to recognize this fact and carefully examine their passion reputation when startups select accelerators.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.61-79
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• 2023

This study is a case study of overseas banana farms as a global agricultural startup that has hardly been attempted so far in terms of paradigm shift in the industry, beyond regional limitations. It was researched for the purpose of revealing the success factors of 'global agricultural startup' in terms of business process, entrepreneurship, and management dimensions learned through direct participation and observation at the local level. In order to study global agricultural startups, this study also conducted a comparative analysis of global startups (global startups) and global agricultural startups(global agricultural startups). In fact, the analysis consists of 'definition', 'components', and 'success factors', and we want to confirm the difference between the two concepts that can be distinguished. The case analysis tried to maximize the advantages of 'participatory action research' by directly observing and experiencing banana farms. In the case of banana farm cases, by dividing them into preparation process for farm development and farm development and management process, various variables considered in farm management were explained through the whole process of farm management. Through the process of overcoming and responding to specific failure cases, we tried to secure the reliability and validity of the research, and the case studies related to entrepreneurship, management, and organization analyzed by applying them by subdividing them into theoretical areas belonging to components and management that were theorized in existing preceding studies. This study is almost the first study on the process of creating a local entry business by directly moving the head office overseas rather than entering overseas agriculture as a subsidiary, joint venture or overseas corporation. In particular, it is a unique case that corresponds to agriculture in terms of region(Africa), scale(startup), and industry that have not been introduced so far as a global agricultural startup. In terms of entrepreneurship, it also concretely exemplified how entrepreneurship components such as innovativeness, risk-taking propensity, proactiveness, vision sharing, social contribution, leadership, etc., which have not been attempted so far in agricultural cases, are manifested and effective. The management and cultural aspects also went beyond the argument that only cultural aspects are important in overseas business, and also confirmed individual failure cases and their responses in recruitment, job, wage, retirement, development, organizational structure management, etc. As a result, there is significance and implications of this study in that it provides theoretical confirmation as well as practical and responsive basis for 'entrepreneurship', 'farming management', and 'management' aspects in overseas agricultural startup business operation.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.83-126
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• 2023

The revenue histogram of venture businesses is shifting from bell-shaped normal distribution to power-law distribution, which implies that the fitness landscape of the venture businesses ecosystem is changing to be more rugged terrain. We argue that the firm should adopt both exploitation (fast follower) and exploration (or first mover) strategies not to get stuck in local maxima in the rugged fitness landscape from the complex system perspective. By designing and performing agent-based modeling simulation experiments which consist of three types of agents (new technologies, entrepreneurs, and consumers), we demonstrated that the ambidexterity strategy showed the highest performance score in three of four different environment except 'Fast Widening' case where the exploitation strategy showed the highest performance score under low technology appropriation and fast disruptive technology development speed. By investigating the financial and other statistics of 617 top venture businesses who have earned 100B won or higher annual revenue, we concluded that 82% and 9% of firms are bent on the exploitation and exploration strategy.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.29-43
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• 2016

The Lean Startup, a methodology for minimizing failure rate of startups, has been receiving attention since its publication in 2011. Although it has been receiving enormous attention as an effective methodology of startups' growth and the emergence of unicorn companies, it is undeniable that the theoretical research and cases on this topic have not been fully accumulated in Korea. Progress of management theory has been made when combining the theory and case studies. In this paper, we thus excavated the 'Cardoc' case, which has applied the lean startup concept to the entire process of service and customer development from the inception of its product design. The following are the findings of the case. First, for the successful application of lean startup, it is essential that all team members to understand the lean startup concept and are willing to apply it thoroughly to the business management. Second, the prompt launching of MVP(Minimum Viable Product) is more important than table discussion. Third, it is crucial to select the appropriate key metrics and analytic tools for effective learning. Fourth, startup must scale up promptly as soon as it verifies the product-market fit through the BML(Build-Measure-Learn) iteration cycle. Fifth, all new business expansion should be lean. Cardoc is currently testing new MVPs in order to move onto the next scale-up process with huge investments in newly added segments. This study is meaningful in that it elaborates the representative case of a Korean startup that has applied the lean startup strategy under the circumstance of insufficient discussion of Korean startup cases in comparison with growing attention both in concept development and case accumulation abroad. We hope that this paper can be a stepping stone for future relevant research on the implementation of lean startup methodology in Korea.

• Proceedings of the Safety Management and Science Conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.295-304
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• 2002

This case describes key development challenges and patterns as experienced by Internet Auction Company, Ltd. from the startup stage through IPO to the sale to eBay. Currently an eBay company, Internet Auction Co. continues to pursue new auction systems and substitute distribution systems for the future with a renewed entrepreneurial spirit. In 1997, Mr Hyuk Oh saw a business opportunity in the Internet allowing two-way communications. At that time, the success stories of eBay and Onsale in the United States were good stimuli to his startup of an auction site. He opened the Website in April 1, 1998 after four months of development efforts. Auction has merit more than other shopping malls. First, it brings about interesting and benefit. Second, it has interactive trade system. Third, customers will trade for reasonable price through direct own will of them. Fourth, Auction's model brings about multitude sale through aggressive sales. Even if Network Marketing has socially negative effect in case of inappropriate use, it is good mood for further business. In case E-Commerce use as useful purpose, it will have competitive priority revenue model.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.67-80
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• 2015

Although recent policies and regulations in Korea strongly advocate and encourage cultivation of venture foundations, studies on venture foundation and success are very limited and often primarily focus on entrepreneurship or individual quality as a venture founder in addition to such studies' validity in question. Therefore, this study primarily focuses on venture preparation process which is subject to venture founder's effort to verify the policy effectiveness in the relationship between venture preparation and business performance. Major goal of this study is to reduce social cost of venture failure by suggesting systematic policy support for venture foundations and analyzing the relationship between following variables: first, venture preparation and financial performance, second, venture preparation and non-financial performance, and third, venture preparation and business performance. 400 initial venture foundations less than 5 years are selected from KISED(Korea Institute Startup & Entrepreneurship Development) trend analysis to carry out statistical analysis using SPSS 18.0. To organize the data features, frequency analysis as well as descriptive statistics are performed to verify the hypothesis. As a result, sub-factors in measurement of venture preparation which are venture education period, venture benefit, and experience of incubating organization are selected as independent variables. Likewise, sub-factors in measurement of business performance which are financial performance and non-financial performance are used as dependent variables. To validate interactive effect, venture preparation period is selected as control variable to perform hierarchical regression analysis. The analysis result verifies that venture benefit has positive influence on financial and non-financial performance while venture education period has positive influence on non-financial influence and experience of incubating organization has negative influence on non-financial performance without influence on financial performance. In addition, interaction of venture preparation period has positive influence solely between venture benefit and non-financial performance. Through this study, appropriate supporting plans depending on the level of venture preparation can be derived to improve business performance of initial venture foundations for policy designer of venture support, and quality rather than quality improvement of venture businesses is possible through investigation of structural issues of individual venture businesses. Ultimately, this study suggests venture founders to determine whether to focus on venture preparation process or to start a venture business.

• Journal of Venture Innovation
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.61-72
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• 2023

In December 2020, the Fair Trade Act related to South Korea's separation of industrial capital was amended, and it was announced that the amendments would come into effect one year later, on December 30, 2021. The amendment's content involved breaking the previous principle of separating industrial capital from financial market penetration, allowing for the ownership of shares in general holding companies, small business startup investment companies, and technology business finance specialist companies. While the previous law was based on total issued shares' ownership, there were fluctuations in the subsequent trends of annual establishment and investment counts, as well as strategic investment counts of CVC (Corporate Venture Capital) before and after the law's amendment. CVC and IVC (Independent Venture Capital) are characterized differently based on their investment purposes, fund management types, and investment types. In this regard, the relaxation of the separation of industrial capital law is expected to have a positive impact on the future of the venture investment ecosystem and innovation ecosystem. In this study, we analyze the trends in the establishment count, investment count, and strategic investment count of domestic CVC from 2018, before the law amendment, to May 2023. Using 2021, the year the amended separation of industrial capital law was implemented, as a reference point, we examine changes in the trend. The analysis results indicate a significant increase in domestic CVC in 2021 compared to the previous year, along with an increase in investment counts, strategic investment counts, and the amount of investment in strategic investments. Based on these findings, this study suggests directions for further research related to future domestic CVC investment, strategic investment, and the activation of the venture investment market.