• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.173-189
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• 2023

As supreme technologies continue to be developed, industries such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robots, aerospace, electric vehicles, and solar energy are created, and the macro business environment is rapidly changing. Due to these large-scale changes and increased complexity, it is necessary to pay attention to the effect of social capital, which can create new value by utilizing capital increasing the importance of relationships rather than technology or asset ownership itself at the level of start-up strategy. Social capital is a concept first proposed by Hanifan in 1916, and refers to the overall sum of capabilities or resources that are latent or available for use in mutual, continuous, organic relationships or accumulated human relationship networks between individuals or social members. In addition, the diversity of start-up teams with diverse backgrounds, characteristics, and capabilities, rather than one exceptional founder, has been emphasized. Founding team diversity refers to the diversity of in-depth factors such as demographic factors, beliefs, and values of the founding team. In addition, changes in the macro environment are emphasizing the importance of technology start-ups and laboratory start-ups that lead industrial innovation and create the nation's core growth engines. This study focused on the I-Corps' program. I-Corps, which means innovation corps, is a laboratory startup program launched by the National Research Foundation (NSF) in 2011 to encourage entrepreneurship and commercialization of research results. It focuses on forming a startup team involving professors, researchers and market discovery activities. Taking these characteristics into account, this study empirically verified the impact of social capital from a network perspective and founding team diversity on I-Corps start-up performance. As a result of the analysis, the educational diversity of the founding team had a negative (-) effect on the financial performance of the founding team. On the other side, the gender diversity and the cognitive dimension of social capital had a positive (+) effect on the financial performance of the founding team. This study is expected to provide more useful theoretical and practical implications regarding the diversity, social capital, and performance interpretation of the I-Corps Lab startup team.