• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.137-157
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• 2017

As unemployment rises and economic growth slows, interest in startups, which is considered to be the driving force of job creation, is increasing. This study aimed to analyze the employment effects of knowledge-based startups in South Korea. In particular, startups were divided into three categories (knowledge-based manufacturing, knowledge-based service, and other industries) and the region were divided into the capital region and the other regions. The result of the analysis, which used census on Establishments Data from Statistics Korea(KOSIS), showed that the employment effects of startups change in three steps over time. When new firms were created, employment increases instantly. However, as the competition among firms increases, some firms exit the market and employment decreases. In the long-term, some firms will survive the market competition and increase their firm size and the number of jobs they offer. The total employment effect was greater for knowledge-based startups than the other industries startups. The total employment effect of knowledge-based startups are 2.84%p for the period of 6 years. Startups in the Capital region showed higher employment effect than startups in other regions. This implies that in the capital region, employment increases more after the startups are created, but due to fierce competition, employment also decreases relatively more than it does in other regions. However, companies that survive competition create more employment. This study may give some policy implications that startup policies should be tailored to the startup's type and regional characteristics in order to achieve more effective job creation performance.

• 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.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.47-64
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• 2017

Three years after establishment, companies are said to face a period of risk called the "valley of death." To start a venture company and make it sustainable, the chance of failure must be minimized. According to an in-depth assessment report on special taxation in 2015, the one-year survival rate of Korean companies was about 60 percent and the five-year survival rate about 30%. These rates are low compared to those of major OECD member countries. Worse, such rates in Korea are decreasing year by year. The purpose of this study is to classify the success factors behind venture companies into human capital, social capital and financial capital, and verify through empirical analysis the factors influencing the success of venture companies based on the mediating roles of capability of the startup team and that for innovation. To find the success factors behind venture companies, this study first examined the theories derived from previous studies. SPSS 21 was used as the study method, while descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis and CMB test were conducted. In addition, SmartPLS 2 was used for confirmatory factor analysis, hypothesis test, mediation effect. The results of this study can help efforts toward job creation and economic revitalization pursued by the creative economy policy of the incumbent Korean administration. They can also be used as the cornerstone for venture companies in their pursuit of success.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.153-174
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• 2016

On account of multiple causes, including prolonged global economic crisis, addressing environmental pollution and the advent of hyper-connected society, a new paradigm called 'sharing economy' has rapidly emerged. Many startups have attempted to build promising business model based on the sharing economy concept. Nevertheless, successful cases are still very rare in the global level, except for Uber and Airbnb cases. Therefore, this study analyzes necessary causes and sufficient causes for successful settlements in the market through a comparative case analysis on digital matching firms in the sharing economy businesses. For the case study, we compare five successful cases (Uber, Airbnb, Kickstarter, TaskRabbit and DogVacay), three failure cases (Homejoy, Ridejoy and Tuterspree) and a platform cooperativism case (Juno) in accordance with six value attributes of business model including value proposition, market segment, value chain, cost structure and profit potential, value network and competitive strategy. We apply Boolean method to support controlled comparison and eliminate unnecessary attributes. The Boolean analysis result shows that value proposition, cost structure and profit potential, value network and competitive strategy are the essential attributes. Furthermore, the result indicates that each attribute is a necessary condition, where all four conditions should be met simultaneously in order to be successful. With this result, we discuss essential consideration for those who are planning startup based on the sharing economy business model.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.179-192
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• 2024

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of entrepreneurial experience, business model innovation and financing on new venture performance. Design/methodology/approach - This study analyzes survey data on new ventures in Korea and investigated research hypothesis by multiple regression analysis. Findings - Founders' prior startup experience have different impacts on performance depending on whether they had a successful or failed startup. Successful experience has a positive impact on early performance, while failure experience has a negative impact. Business model innovation shows a positive and significant relationship with early performance. External financing has different effects depending on the type of funding source and performance variables. VC funding is positively related to employment creation, while government R&D funding is negatively related to sales volume. Research implications or Originality - This study confirms that the impact of entrepreneurial experience on early performance varies depending on the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs. It also empirically confirms that business model innovation has a significant impact on early performance. We empirically examine the relationship between various external financing sources of venture firms and early performance. Since the effects of entrepreneurial experience, business model innovation, and external financing on early stage performance may be different, entrepreneurs should consider these relationships when pursuing early stage business opportunities.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.65-76
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• 2023

In the field of technology entrepreneurship and startups, the development of Artificial Intelligence(AI) has emerged as a key topic for business model innovation. As a result, venture firms are making various efforts centered on AI to secure competitiveness(Kim & Geum, 2023). The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between the development of GenAI technology and the startup ecosystem by analyzing domestic news articles to identify trends in the technology startup field. Using BIG Kinds, this study examined the changes in GenAI-related news articles, major issues, and trends in Korean news articles from 1990 to August 10, 2023, focusing on the emergence of ChatGPT before and after, and visualized the relevance through network analysis and keyword visualization. The results of the study showed that the mention of GenAI gradually increased in the articles from 2017 to 2023. In particular, OpenAI's ChatGPT service based on GPT-3.5 was highlighted as a major issue, indicating the popularization of language model-based GenAI technologies such as OpenAI's DALL-E, Google's MusicLM, and VoyagerX's Vrew. This proves the usefulness of GenAI in various fields, and since the launch of ChatGPT, Korean companies have been actively developing Korean language models. Startups such as Ritten Technologies are also utilizing GenAI to expand their scope in the technology startup field. This study confirms the connection between GenAI technology and startup entrepreneurship activities, which suggests that it can support the construction of innovative business strategies, and is expected to continue to shape the development of GenAI technology and the growth of the startup ecosystem. Further research is needed to explore international trends, the utilization of various analysis methods, and the possibility of applying GenAI in the real world. These efforts are expected to contribute to the development of GenAI technology and the growth of the startup ecosystem.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.7
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• pp.300-308
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• 2016

Research on OECD and Korea have shown that high-growth startups are the keys to job creation and that these companies are very important for economic growth. Given that the large-scale entry of women into the labor force accelerates economic growth and women have far lower levels of participation in growth-oriented entrepreneurship than men do, accelerating female entrepreneurship could have positive effects on the Korean economy. This paper uses data from several databases to do a comparison analysis between women's and men's start-ups to explore the factors that explain the lag in building high-growth firms among women. Women startups make up nearly 34% of startups(defined as less than 7 years of establishment), but only 6% of high-growth startups. Women rarely own large businesses, reflecting their low levels of initial capital and outside financing. Regardless of gender, entrepreneurs face many of the same challenges in starting businesses, but this study shows three primary factors for female entrepreneurs that lead to a less high-growth startup: a greater financing gap than for men(this gap is more apparent for high-growth firms), a lack of ideas, knowledge, and experience(related to the lack of mentorship), and lastly the difficulty maintaining a work-life balance. The findings are very similar with those found in studie's in the US(financing gap, work-life balance, and lack of mentorship). Further studies are required to identify more specific factors behind the gender gap in ideas, knowledge, and experience.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.1-20
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• 2021

As the Great Reset is discussed at the World Economic Forum due to the COVID-19 pandemic, artificial intelligence, the driving force of the 4th industrial revolution, is also in the spotlight. However, corporate research in the field of artificial intelligence is still scarce. Since 2000, related research has focused on how to create value by applying artificial intelligence to existing companies, and research on how startups seize opportunities and enter among existing businesses to create new value can hardly be found. Therefore, this study analyzed the cases of startups using the comprehensive framework of the multi-level perspective with the research question of how artificial intelligence based startups, a sub-industry of software, have different innovation patterns from the existing software industry. The target firms are gazelle firms that have been certified as venture firms in South Korea, as start-ups within 7 years of age, specializing in machine learning modeling purposively sampled in the medical, finance, marketing/advertising, e-commerce, and manufacturing fields. As a result of the analysis, existing software companies have achieved process innovation from an enterprise-wide integration perspective, in contrast machine learning technology based startups identified unit processes that were difficult to automate or create value by dismantling existing processes, and automate and optimize those processes based on data. The contribution of this study is to analyse the birth of artificial intelligence-based startups and their innovation patterns while validating the framework of an integrated multi-level perspective. In addition, since innovation is driven based on data, the ability to respond to data-related regulations is emphasized even for start-ups, and the government needs to eliminate the uncertainty in related systems to create a predictable and flexible business environment.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.167-179
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• 2012

This research is brought to suggest the policy paradigm shift alternative and to show breakthrough by diagnosing the cons of government's current youth entrepreneurship promotion emphasizing a showup performance. More specific points, first, this paper investigate the policy limitations of government's current youth entrepreneurship promotion. Second, this paper develop upgrade model of youth entrepreneurship promotion through benchmarking the foreign successful cases. Third, this paper suggest, the alternative of taking off ver 1.0 of government's current youth entrepreneurship promotion policy paradigm, new paradigm of government policy emphasizing 'Good Quality Youth Startup.' In this research, youth entrepreneurship promotion policy should be emphasized that the implementation of the "open" system. Open systems can collaborate in the young founder of the market building, matching based entrepreneurship run in conjunction with enough experience and the founder of the startup entirely after reviewing the market, or starting to reconsider, and also will open the path be employed in the leading venture firms participating in the group market. Therefore, entrepreneurship promotion policy raising the capabilities of the current situation of young people in the business after graduating from a wide selection of alternative plan that is characterized by a large system.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.125-135
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• 2016

It is well known that the encouraging startups play a major role for innovation in an economy. Thus, venture capital are indispensable for the growth of startups. The literature on investment performance of venture capital reveals that the investment strategies depend largely on the characteristics and capabilities of venture capital. Therefore, investment capability of venture capital is important. There are various investing roles that can be identified by venture capital when determining what kind of startup to invest in, whom to invest with, how to invest, how to post-investment management after investment, and so on. This research was conducted to understand the effect of investment capabilities of venture capital on investment performance. To do so, we surveyed 70 venture businesses in the Seoul and Gyeonggido region for an empirical analysis. The empirical results of this paper are summarized as follows. First, the financial performance of venture firms is influenced by the financial capacity of venture capitalists, and investment evaluation of venture capital. Second, the business performance of venture firms is influenced by the marketing support consulting of venture capital, and investment evaluation of venture capital.