• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.215-235
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• 2024

As artificial intelligence (AI) technology is recognized as a key technology that will determine future national competitiveness, competition for AI technology and industry promotion policies in major countries is intensifying. This study aims to present implications for domestic policy making by analyzing the policies of major countries on the start-up of AI companies, which are the basis of the AI industry ecosystem. The top four countries and the EU for the number of new investment attraction companies in the 2023 AI Index announced by the HAI Research Institute at Stanford University in the United States were selected, The United States enacted the National AI Initiative Act (NAIIA) in 2021. Through this law, The US Government is promoting continued leadership in the United States in AI R&D, developing reliable AI systems in the public and private sectors, building an AI system ecosystem across society, and strengthening DB management and access to AI policies conducted by all federal agencies. In the 14th Five-Year (2021-2025) Plan and 2035 Long-term Goals held in 2021, China has specified AI as the first of the seven strategic high-tech technologies, and is developing policies aimed at becoming the No. 1 AI global powerhouse by 2030. The UK is investing in innovative R&D companies through the 'Future Fund Breakthrough' in 2021, and is expanding related investments by preparing national strategies to leap forward as AI leaders, such as the implementation plan of the national AI strategy in 2022. Israel is supporting technology investment in start-up companies centered on the Innovation Agency, and the Innovation Agency is leading mid- to long-term investments of 2 to 15 years and regulatory reforms for new technologies. The EU is strengthening its digital innovation hub network and creating the InvestEU (European Strategic Investment Fund) and AI investment fund to support the use of AI by SMEs. This study aims to contribute to analyzing the policies of major foreign countries in making AI company start-up policies and providing a basis for Korea's strategy search. The limitations of the study are the limitations of the countries to be analyzed and the failure to attempt comparative analysis of the policy environments of the countries under the same conditions.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.69-81
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• 2014

There is a growing interest in the technology transfer and commercialization both at home and abroad. Accordingly, this study looked at the concept of technology transfer and commercialization, identified the factors that should be taken into account in order to facilitate technology transfer and commercialization, and then performed a empirical analysis. As for the conventional technology transfer and commercialization, there was a tendency to limit its scope to the exploration, transfer and commercialization of technology itself. Here in this research, technology transfer and commercialization is defined the category to expand as various activities implemented in order to make sure that intellectual properties such as intangible technological developments, know-how, and knowledge are transferred between the relevant parties through a contract or negotiation, and the party to which the transfer is made can then further develop and exploit the technology into tangible products and other activities to obtain economic benefit out of that. In addition, the findings of the positive analysis of technology transfer and commercialization revealed that the focus of facilitating technology transfer has been on the technology itself, its management and securing efficiency of the systems and institutions involved in the technology transfer and commercialization. So there was lack of recognition as to the importance of financial support given to the phase of technology commercialization. This indicates that when it comes to the technology transfer and commercialization, quantitative performance has been the focus of interest such as patent application, registration, number of technology transfers, royalty, etc. So there was not enough understanding as to the issues of starting up a business, creating quality jobs through technology transfer and commercialization, which are directly related to the realization of the creative economy. In this regard, this research is expected to be used for the development for the future policies to boost technology transfer and commercialization as it suggests not only simply ensuring quantitative performance but also necessary to create the environment for the creation of the stable ecosystem for the parties involved in the technology transfer and commercialization and then to build circumstances in which creative economy can be realized.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.1-15
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• 2016

Startups in Korea are experiencing for themselves the laws of survival through competition in the local and international market, and are performing active business movements based on these. Korea's economic growth rate is 2.6% due to the slump in the domestic demand and reduced exports brought by the MERSC incident in 2015. The Korea Development Institute has estimated the economic growth rate in 2016 to be around 3.0%. South Korea's economy is facing the crisis of low-growth solidification due to the decrease in economic growth, and it is forecasted that growth without employment and polarization will worsen. Startups in the high-tech industrial generation of a particular field wherein the market environment is rapidly changing must maintain a competitive advantage with the capabilities and functions exclusive to them. It is very important that they maintain a competitive edge by utilizing the capabilities exclusive to startup companies. Likewise, the accumulation of resources is also crucial in determining the success of a startup business. In a poor local startup ecosystem, majority of the startup companies are performing their business activities while striving for survival, rather than success. About 80% are struggling to survive and are failing to overcome the "Death Valley" faced 3-5 years after establishing the company. Since majority of the startups fail to achieve results during the initial stages of foundation, the importance of research on business activities and achievement during the early stages of establishment is being raised. In accordance to this, this research has performed an actual analysis on how the activities of startups during their preparation phase and early stages affect their achievements. A survey was done on the CEOs or executives (people in a position to make decisions) of local small and medium-sized enterprises that are considered start-ups, and 203 valid data were collected and analyzed. Results showed that the discoveries and utilized activities necessary for the businesses of startups have a significant impact on their achievement through the entrepreneur resources and external partners' cooperation; additionally, the related implications were discussed.

• 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.15 no.1
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• pp.71-94
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• 2020

Korea's innovation cluster policy has been implemented since 2005 with the goal of balanced regional development. The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors affecting the sustainability of innovative cluster tenants by using Pangyo Techno Valley as an example. Pangyo Techno Valley was established under the leadership of the local government (Gyeonggi-do) rather than the central government and it is called "Silicon Valley of Korea" and "Asia Silicon Valley" and is becoming more representative. The growing number of companies in Pangyo Techno Valley decreased in 2017 compared to 2016. This is because Pangyo Techno Valley's business ecosystem will change from 2019. In this paper, quantitative and qualitative studies were conducted to investigate the influencing factors. Quantitative research was conducted based on the survey and qualitative research was applied through interviews. The quantitative research examined the factors affecting the sustainability of Pangyo Techno Valley, and the qualitative research examined the specific reasons and additional factors for the quantitative research results. The quantitative results showed that factors affecting sustainability in terms of changes in corporate internal conditions, human and physical infrastructure, cooperation and synergy, and occupancy patterns. The specific reason for the impact appeared in the qualitative research process. The support category of local governments did not show any significant factors in quantitative research. In addition, qualitative research suggested 'Good image of Pangyo Techno Valley' as the category that has the greatest impact on sustainability. It is shown that companies are passive and expect the role of local governments in activating cooperation network in Pangyo Techno Valley. In this paper, based on the results of the study, Pangyo Techno Valley is presented with a realistic plan based on real estate issues and an ideal plan with a long-term perspective.

• 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.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.105-119
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• 2021

The innovation cluster is formed by cooperation and networking among a number of actors, including companies, universities, research institutes, government and other supporting organizations, but the main subject of innovation in the venture ecosystem, which can be said to be the core of the innovation cluster, is the enterprise. Therefore, enterprises in innovation cluster can be seen as a major user of the innovation cluster policy. In order for the policy to be executed smoothly, policy acceptance is important. However, existing research on policy prioritization tends to be centered on policy providers, so it is necessary to check them from the perspective of policy users. Accordingly, this study conducted discussions from a two-way perspective to establish the correct policy direction through a balanced perspective between a policy provider-centered top-down perspective and a policy user's bottom-up perspective. First, the factors for activating the innovation cluster (three factors in the first level and 14 factors in the second level) were derived through prior research and expert interviews. After that, the importance of the factors for activating the innovation cluster was analyzed using AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) for the policy provider group and the user group in the Daedeok Innopolis, a representative case of innovation cluster policy. As a result of analyzing the importance of the innovation cluster activation factors from the perspectives of policy providers and users, some similarities were also seen, but overall differences in mutual perception were found. It was found that the policy provider group focused on innovation creation factors, while the policy user group viewed innovation creation, clusters, and industrial location factors from a more balanced perspective. This study is meaningful in that it deals with both perspectives in a balanced way by expanding the targets from the existing policy provider-centered research to policy users. In addition, practical contributions exist in the aspect of providing basic data so that policies can be carried out based on corporate needs in fostering innovation clusters.

• 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.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.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.191-209
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• 2023

Amid rapid changes in technological innovation due to the influence of the 4th Industrial Revolution and COVID-19, research related to absorption capacity and patent activities to promote technological innovation of Korean technology start-ups is important in this uncertain environment. This study aims to examine the effects on entrepreneurial performance and patent activities by reconstructing absorptive capacity, an organizational capability, for technology-based startups in fields such as BT and ICT with less than seven years of establishment, distinguishing between potential absorptive capacity and realized absorptive capacity. The study also seeks to develop a theoretical research model. To accomplish this, data was collected from managerial executives, including CEOs of 215 technology startups. The following hypotheses were tested: Firstly, potential absorptive capacity had a significant impact on patent activities, while realized absorptive capacity did not. Secondly, potential absorptive capacity had a significant impact on technological performance, while realized absorptive capacity did not. Thirdly, both potential and realized absorptive capacity had a significant impact on financial and non-financial performance. Fourthly, patent activities indirectly influenced potential absorptive capacity and technological performance, but did not affect realized absorptive capacity. Fifthly, patent activities indirectly influenced potential absorptive capacity and financial performance, but did not affect realized absorptive capacity. Lastly, patent activities indirectly influenced potential absorptive capacity and non-financial performance, but did not affect realized absorptive capacity. The practical significance of this study lies in providing useful guidelines for building the core capabilities of organizations through absorptive capacity and patent activities. Furthermore, it is expected that startups that have not recognized the formation process of absorptive capacity for patent activities will perceive the formation mechanism of absorptive capability anew and show considerable interest in future potential and realized absorptive capacity as part of their management strategies. This is anticipated to play an important role in adapting to rapidly changing technological advancements, the startup ecosystem, and securing sustainable competitive advantages.